The Black Knight Chronicles (Omnibus Edition)

  Praise for The Black Knight Chronicles

  “Honestly, this is one of the best books that I’ve read this year and certainly a new series that I will be following from here on out.”

  —Black Lagoon Reviews

  “I love this book. It makes me happy in a way that hasn’t happened in a long, long time.”

  —Keryl Raist, Author of Sylvianna

  “This is another great book in what will hopefully be a large and successful series. I know I will be eagerly awaiting the next installment.” —Indie Book Blog

  ii

  The Black Knight Chronicles, Omnibus Edition

  Book One: Hard Day’s Knight Book Two: Back In Black Book Three: Knight Moves

  by

  John G. Hartness

  Bell Bridge Books

  iii This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons (living or dead), events or locations is entirely coincidental.

  Bell Bridge Books

  PO BOX 300921

  Memphis, TN 38130

  Print ISBN: 978-1-61194-201-9

  Bell Bridge Books is an Imprint of BelleBooks, Inc. The Black Knight Chronicles , Omnibus Edition copyright © 2012 by John G. Hartness

  Hard Day’s Knight copyright © 2012 by John G. Hartness Back In Black copyright © 2012 by John G. Hartness Knight Moves copyright © 2012 by John G. Hartness

  Printed and bound in the United States of America. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer,

  who may quote brief passages in a review.

  Previous editions of the books in this omnibus were published by Falstaff Books 2010.

  We at BelleBooks enjoy hearing from readers.

  Visit our websites – www.BelleBooks.com and www.BellBridgeBooks.com. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Cover design: Debra Dixon

  Interior design: Hank Smith

  Photo credits:

  Christine Griffin

  :Lkbo:01:

  iv

  Table of Contents

  Book One: Hard Day’s Knight................................. 1

  Book Two: Back In Black ................................... 149

  Book Three: Knight Moves ................................... 299

  v

  Book 1:

  HardDay’sKnight

  Dedication

  This book is dedicated to some of the fantastic teachers I’ve had in my life. Thanks for the helping hand and the kick in the butt.

  Thanks to:

  Marc Powers Anne Fletcher Blair Beasley

  Ed Haynes

  Deborah Hobbs Kay McSpadden William Good Jan West

  Durham Smith Linwood Littlejohn Billie Hicklin Betty Dickson

  Chapter 1

  I hate waking up in an unfamiliar place. I’ve slept in pretty much the same bed for the past fifteen years, so when I wake up someplace new, it really throws me off. When I wake up tied to a metal folding chair in the center of an abandoned warehouse that reeks of stale cigarette smoke, diesel fuel and axle grease—well, that really starts my night on a sparkling note.

  My mood deteriorated further when I heard a voice behind me say, “It’s about time you woke up, bloodsucker.”

  Why do people have to be rude? It’s a condition, like freckles. I’m a vampire. Deal with it. We can do without the slurs, thank you very much.

  “Go easy on the bloodsucker, pal. I haven’t had breakfast,” was what I tried to say, but since my mouth was duct-taped shut, I sounded more like a retarded Muppet than a fearsome creature of the night.

  My repartee needed work if I hoped to talk my way out of this. Of course, if my mysterious captor had wanted me dead, he’d had all day to make that happen. Instead, I woke up tied to a standard metal folding chair, the kind that gets sacrificed in countless professional wrestling matches. I tested my bonds. I was tied tight, and whatever he had bound me with burned—making him devout and the binding blessed, or the bonds were silver. My money was on silver. The true believers are more the stake-them-in-the-coffins types than the kidnap-them-and-tie-them-tochairs types.

  “Shut up, bloodsucker. You, as the one tied to the chair with silver chains, get to sit there and do whatever I say.” My captor moved around in front where I could get a good look at him. I knew him, of course. It’s never the new guy in town who ties you to a chair. It’s always that creepy guy who you’ve seen lurking around the cemetery for a couple weeks in mid-October, the one that you can’t decide if he’s there to mourn or for some other reason. And, of course, it’s always some other reason.

  I’d seen this guy hanging around one of the big oak trees in my cemetery for a couple of weeks, near the freshest grave in the joint. I never paid much attention to his wardrobe until now, figuring it was close to Halloween, so he was just a goth kid getting a jump on the competition, but in retrospect I realized I should have. He wore almost stereotypical vampire-hunter garb. Black jeans, black boots, long black coat, wide-brimmed black hat. Christ, I bet he owned the Van Helsing Blu-ray. I swore then that if I ever got the chance, I was eating Hugh Jackman’s liver. No, we don’t usually eat people, but liver’s a good source of blood, and I was pissed. I had been caught and trussed up like a Thanksgiving turkey by a skinny teen who watched too many bad vampire movies.

  This kid was white, about sixteen, with mousy brown hair, and he looked like he played too much Call of Duty instead of getting a job. His skin was paler than mine, for crying out loud, and I’m dead. His clothes hung loose, like scarecrow garb, on his scrawny frame, and he either had an asthma inhaler in his front pocket or was happy to see me. God, I hoped it was an inhaler.

  The kid reached forward and ripped the tape off, taking a layer or two of skin with it.

  “OWWW!” I yelled, straining against my bonds. “You little rat bastard, I swear to God I am going to drink you dry and leave your body on the lawn like . . . like an empty bag of flesh!”

  Okay, my similes need some work.

  “I don’t think so, bloodsucker. I think you’re going to do anything I tell you to, or I’ll leave you tied up there to starve.”

  He had a point there. It’s not like there were very many people who would miss a vampire, and I hadn’t yet figured out how to get loose from whatever silver-lined bonds he’d created. Sitting here and starving was entirely possible.

  “All right, what do you want?” I asked. Might as well find out right now if he wanted something simple or—

  “I want you to turn me,” he replied. The look of hope on his face was a little pathetic, really, but there was a determination there that was disturbing. Talking him out of his demand was not going to be easy.

  “No.” I wanted to get the short and simple part out of the way first, then we could move on to the lengthy explanations.

  “Oh, but you will.” He leered at me like a bad movie villain.

  “Oh, but I won’t.” I just sat there. I couldn’t do anything else, but one thing was certain—I was not turning this asshat into a vampire.

  “I demand that you turn me. You are at my mercy and must do as I say,” the asshat proclaimed. I craned my neck to see if there was an audience behind him. Nope, we were alone and he was performing for the rats in the warehouse.

  “Not a chance.”

  “But . . . but . . . you have to.”

  “Not gonna happen, kid,” I repeated.

  “Why not?” He deflated lik
e a Macy’s parade balloon in a cactus field. Suddenly he wasn’t a grandiose vampire hunter, but a scared teenager who’d caught a tiger by his toe and really didn’t know what to do with him now.

  “Because I don’t turn people. Because this life isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Because you’d miss all those romantical sunsets you probably write maudlin poetry about. Because it’s not fair to the ecosystem to add another predator. Because we don’t really sparkle. All of the above. None of the above. Pick a reason, kid, any reason you like. I’m not turning you.” I started to look around for another way to get out of this mess, but it didn’t look good for our hero. That’d be me since it’s my story. Dammit.

  For a skinny little gamer-geek, he’d done a good job tying me up. I guess that’s another thing we can thank the Internet for—unlimited access to fetish porn has improved the knot-tying ability of men who can’t get dates. I couldn’t exactly see my hands, but by straining forward, I could see that my ankles were tied to separate legs of the chair with those plastic zip ties you get in the electrical aisle. I could see a silver necklace wound around each tie, and by the way my wrists felt, he’d done the same thing there.

  The silver sapped the strength from my arms by contact, and I couldn’t get enough leverage with my legs to do anything useful. I looked up to try and Jedi mind trick my kidnapper, when I noticed two things: one—he was wearing polarized sunglasses, which was a neat idea, although ultimately useless against my mental abilities, and two—he was crying.

  “You have to turn me!” Tears streamed down his cheeks. “I’m running out of time, and this was the only thing I could think of to fix it!”

  I couldn’t believe myself. I was actually starting to feel sorry for the guy. “Okay, kid. Why don’t you tell me what’s wrong, and I’ll see if I can help?”

  “No one can help, but if I were one of the Undead I could help myself.” I swear I could actually hear him capitalize undead.

  “You know that’s kinda my job, right? Helping people that can’t help themselves. Kinda like the A-Team, without the Mohawk and the van. Reach into my shirt pocket and grab a business card. I promise not to bite you. The Undead cannot tell a lie.” Total bullshit, but I’ve often found people dumb enough to romanticize the whole vampire thing will believe almost anything.

  He reached into my pocket and took out a business card. It had my name, James Black, and cell-phone number under a logo—Black Knight Investigations, Shedding Light On Your Darkest Problems. Neither the company name nor the stupid slogan was my idea. And I prefer Jimmy to James.

  “You’re a detective?”

  I nodded.

  “And you think you can help me?”

  “I can’t really know that until you tell me what your problem is. So, why don’t you untie me, and we can talk about this like a pair of reasonable people?” I put a little mojo into my eyes, and he started toward me with a pair of wire cutters in his hand. Then all hell broke loose instead of me.

  Chapter 2

  There was a huge crash from behind me, and I had a sinking feeling that my cavalry had arrived. I twisted around in my chair to see what was going on and watched as part of the roof came down in a shower of glass from the skylight and rotted wood. A rotund form struck the ground with a bone-jarring thump and lay sprawled on the concrete floor. From the curses emanating from the same general vicinity as the body, my suspicions were confirmed. My partner had arrived to save the day. With his usual subtlety and success rate.

  “What the hell?” The kid stared at what had fallen through the roof, my freedom momentarily forgotten. I leaned forward onto my tiptoes and the front two chair legs and turned myself around to watch the floor show provided by my best friend and business partner, Gregory W. Knightwood IV. He’s the “Knight” in Black Knight Investigations. Greg looked a little the worse for wear from his fall, but apparently none of the wood he fell on pierced his heart. Otherwise, I’d be looking for someone else to share naming rights with. After a few more seconds of muttered cursing, Greg realized that he had an audience and sprang to his feet, swirling his cape around him dramatically.

  At least that was the idea. It’s hard to swirl properly when part of the cape is draped over your head, but he gave it a hell of a try. Greg sometimes takes the whole vampire thing a little too much to heart. I was not surprised he’d chosen this moment as one of those times. In addition to the cape, he was dressed all in black spandex, which was not a good look for a guy who topped out at five foot nine and weighed somewhere around two-forty. He had on motorcycle boots, also black, and what looked like an honest-to-God utility belt. It was kinda like a cross between Batman and the Goodyear Blimp. At least Greg wasn’t wearing a mask this time.

  He fought with the cape for a few more seconds before finally mumbling something rude and tearing it to shreds. He looked at my captor with his most menacing stare and said, “Release my partner, and you might live to see another sunrise.”

  I thought that was a pretty good line under most circumstances, but Greg didn’t know that the kid didn’t want to live to see any more sunrises. Needless to say, he was a little taken aback when the kid lunged at him with a cross in hand. Greg stumbled backward a step before his vampire abilities outweighed his natural clumsiness, and he caught himself. Then he reached out, grabbed the cross from the kid and flung it across the room. The kid’s eyes widened as he realized what kind of trouble he was in. Greg reached out and grabbed him by the throat, lifting him off the ground with one hand.

  At least, he lifted him a couple of inches, because Greg was way shorter than the kid and didn’t have the height to properly impress the wannabe vampire. Greg and the kid both seemed to realize this at about the same time, and Greg tossed him across the room in the general direction of his holy symbol. Then he came over to where I was bound and began to free me.

  “Nice entrance.” I smirked a little.

  “You want to stay tied to the chair?”

  Good point. I shut up and let him go about the delicate task of

  unwinding the silver from my wrists and snipping the wire ties. At least the kid had dropped the wire cutters close by so Greg didn’t have to use his teeth. He’d freed my right arm when I caught a glimpse of movement out of the corner of my eye. I opened my mouth to warn my partner when he turned on the kid.

  Vampires are fast. Like, ridiculously fast. And the first time a mortal gets a real eyeful of how fast we are, it usually freaks the person out. Not this kid, though. He was standing over Greg with a broken piece of lumber, probably what used to be a skylight, and Greg’s faster-than-human whirl didn’t give him a second’s pause. He swung from the heels and cracked the board right over Greg’s head with everything he had.

  “Ouch,” Greg said as he stared at my would-be kidnapper. “You’re still standing.” The kid had a good grasp of the obvious, I had to give him that.

  “Punk, the only thing you can do with that stick that will bother me is to shove it through my heart. And there’s no way I’m just going to stand here and let you do that.” Greg reached out and snatched the two-by-four out of the kid’s hands. The kid tried to hold onto it, but Greg was way too strong for that. The board clattered end over end across the warehouse, and Greg passed me the clippers. “Why don’t you finish the job? I think I need to keep an eye on your friend here to make sure he doesn’t do anything else stupid.”

  I snipped the last plastic tie, shook myself free of the silver chain and stretched my arms and legs. Undead or not, being tied with your arms behind your back was damned uncomfortable. At least I didn’t have to worry about him cutting off circulation to my extremities. I stepped to one side and pointed at the chair.

  “Sit,” I ordered.

  “Are you going to turn me now?” the kid asked.

  “No, but I am going to get a few answers, and I don’t particularly care if you give them to me willingly or if I have to compel you to answer me.” I’m not very good at compulsion, but he didn’t know that.
<
br />   “I’ll talk, just don’t hurt me.”

  I shook my head. The idiot wanted to be turned into a vampire, and he didn’t think that was going to hurt? Kids these days. He sat in the only chair as I looked around for a stool or something and found nothing. Looked like Greg and I would be standing for the interrogation. Greg was poking through the kid’s backpack, which was lying in the open trunk of an old sedan. Apparently that’s how I’d been brought in, trussed up in the trunk of a Buick. Fantastic.

  “Now, what’s so awful that you want to be turned into a vampire to get away from it?” I asked.

  Greg’s head whipped around like it was on a swivel. “He wants what?”

  “Yeah, apparently young Mister . . .” I paused and looked at the kid.

  “Harris. Tommy Harris,” he spluttered.

  “Apparently young Mister Tommy Harris here wants to become one of the undead. He brought me here to turn him into a bloodsucking demon of the night. I haven’t figured out yet if he has an unhealthy affection for the taste of human blood, or just doesn’t like going to the beach, but that’s why he kidnapped me.”

  “Wow,” Greg said, slamming the trunk of the car and leaning on it. “He’s dumber than he looks if he thought he could bully you into turning him. Isn’t he?” Greg gave me an odd look, like he thought I might have actually turned the punk.

  Greg is the only vampire I’ve created, way back when I was newly turned myself and not completely in control of my powers. Sometimes he picks inopportune times to play that guilt card.

  “Yeah, pretty dumb.” I decided not to air any dirty laundry in public and turned back to my kidnapper. “Tommy, what’s going on that’s so bad that you need to become a vampire to be able to deal with it? Maybe we can help. As I was explaining before my partner’s unexpected entrance—” Greg sketched a rough salute from the trunk of the car, “—we are private investigators and we’re pretty good at what we do. Maybe we can help you.”