Hard Day's Knight (Black Knight Chronicles) Read online

  Yes, I carry a hanky. Some habits are hard to break. I carry a pocketknife, too. I’m just old-fashioned that way. Get over it.

  With her successfully bound and gagged, I looked the very angry detective in the face and said, “We are about to get a lot of things straightened out. This is a terrible idea on my part and may very well end up with one or more of us dying a horrible death. But it’s the only idea I’ve got at this point, so just deal with it.” With that, I tossed her over my shoulder and started back toward Mike’s car.

  “Mike,” I hollered back over my shoulder. “Pop the trunk.” He and Greg had started moving about the same time I had, and by the time I got to the car with my kicking bundle of detective, they were close enough to open the trunk. I deposited my cargo, leaned in and took the gag out. I didn’t want her to choke, after all.

  I leaned into the trunk and got right into her face. With fangs on full display, I said, “Now I’m very sorry you have to ride in the trunk. And I’m very, very sorry about the level of gross going on in said trunk. But you’ve been a real pain in the butt tonight, and we’re going to my place to clear the air. So I’ll be taking this” and I removed her pistol from her side “and this” and grabbed her portable radio “to make sure you behave on the trip. Oh, and I think I’ll take these, too.” And I took her backup piece, a nice little .38 off one ankle. I also relieved her of her cell phone and her spare handcuff keys. I slammed the trunk shut and got in the passenger seat. It was nice of Greg to read my mood well enough not to make me call “shotgun.” He just got in the back seat and sat there, eyes wide.

  “Let’s go home, Mike.”

  “With her?” He asked.

  “Yep. And we should probably not be too concerned about the speed limit or stop lights. The sun’s coming up fast, and I’d rather not be a sausage biscuit by the time we get home.” Mike drove like a bat out of hell, and we got into the cottage and downstairs just before Greg and I started to smolder. Mike moved his car around to the back, where it would be out of view from the road, and I deposited our guest in the armchair.

  “Now here’s the deal. Any screaming and I gag you. I’m going to take the handcuffs off, but you can’t have any of your guns back until I decide you’re no longer a threat. Ditto your portable and cell phone. And no one will be tracking you by the GPS in those toys, because I took the battery out of both of them. Capiche?” She nodded.

  I hadn’t bothered to re-gag her, but she just sat there with her jaw set and a supremely irritated look in her eyes. I reached around behind her to take the handcuffs off, and she leaned in and bit down on the top of my ear, hard. I yelped and pulled back, and she came with me. I’d already unfastened one cuff, so her hands were free to start punching me and gouging for my eyes, and we both tumbled to the floor in a writhing heap of black clothing and angry flesh. We rolled around on the floor for a few minutes, thrashing about until I heard Greg’s voice from the kitchen.

  “Just stay on the stairs, Mike. The children are playing.”

  “Oh, is that what they’re calling it these days? I realize it’s been a long time since I took my vows, but it looks decidedly like something else.” My friends share a stupid sense of humor. I usually find them amusing, but I had a giantess attached to my ear, and she kept putting a thumb in my eye socket, so I was rapidly losing patience with this game.

  I let her roll us around until she was on top, and as she sat up to throw a monster punch at my face, I just looked up at her and grinned. “Why Detective, if I’d known that’s how you liked to play, I would have tied you up the first time we met.” Her eyes narrowed, and she let fly a punch that certainly would have broken my nose if it had connected. Which was exactly why I didn’t let it connect.

  I caught her arm and sat up abruptly, dumping her off on her rump. I stood, still holding her wrist, and she had no option but to follow me to an upright position. When we were both standing, I marveled silently once more at her height, and then slowly steered her around until the couch was behind her. She kept hitting me the whole time, and finally connected a stinging shot to my cheek, raking her nails down the side of my face. Blood welled up in the scratches, but her eyes got very big as the scratches healed right before her eyes.

  “Yeah,” I said. “That happens. Now that you know you can’t hurt me, you want to sit down and we can talk about this like grownups?” She nodded silently, her eyes never leaving the spot on my face that should have still been bleeding. I pushed her gently back to a sitting position in the armchair and said “I’m going to let you go now. If you attack me again, I’m going to knock the ever-loving crap out of you and hang you by your ankles from the rafters. Do you understand me?” She nodded, and I let go of her wrist. She rubbed it absently, catching the handcuff key I tossed to her. She uncuffed her other hand, and put the cuffs and keys back on her belt.

  “What are you?” She asked after a minute.

  “Do you really want to get to the tough questions this quickly?” I asked right back. “How about a beer first, at least? Or something stronger? We have a full bar.”

  “Beer is good. Light if you have it.”

  “Greg, a light beer for the lady. And a bourbon for me, if you don’t mind.” He fixed the drinks while I kept an eye on our guest. When he delivered the drinks, he took a position standing behind the chair. I settled onto one end of the sofa, and Mike grabbed a chair from the kitchen table for himself.

  When we were all settled in, I looked over at Detective Law and laid it out for her. “Here’s the deal. We’re going to take a huge chance with everything we’re telling you tonight. Usually, whenever we get into a jam that we can’t talk our way out of immediately, we just mojo the person into forgetting they ever met us. But for some reason we can’t mojo you. So we’re going to tell you the whole story, with no BS. And when we’re done, you’re going to tell us how you plan to react. And then we all get to sit around and figure out what to do about all this.”

  “All what? You mean the kidnapped girls and the pile of dead people in Marshall Park?”

  “That’s part of it, but the more immediate concern to Greg and I is what you’ll do with the information we’re giving you tonight. Now, shall we get started?” She nodded.

  “Mike, you might want to go ahead and go back to the church. Get some rest, this is probably going to take a few hours at least.”

  “Jimmy-boy, I know I’m not as young as I once was, but I can miss a night’s sleep without too many ill effects. Besides, I can sleep in your room if I need to catch a little shut-eye while you’re talking to the young lady.”

  “That’s your call, Mikey, but if I were still alive I’d be afraid that Jimmy’s laundry would rise up in the middle of the morning and strangle me. I’m beat. If you think you can keep T.J. Hooker here from getting away, I’m gonna crash for a few hours.”

  “Fair enough, Greg. ‘Night.”

  “Night.” He went into his room and closed the door. A few seconds later we could hear music coming from inside. Greg likes to sleep to music, which is okay when he’s in an Enya mood, like tonight. It’s way less okay when he decides to be lulled to sleep by Green Day.

  I finished my drink and turned back to Detective Law. “We’re vampires.” I waited, but there was no reaction. “Well?”

  “Well, what?”

  “Well, don’t you have anything to say to that?”

  “Look, Jim, I’ve been a detective for the last ten years. This might surprise you, but you’re not the first person I’ve come across that thinks he’s a vampire. I figured that out a while ago. The black clothes, the no eating food, the nighttime-only business hours. Obviously you’re part of some type of vampire cult or something.”

  I sighed. This had to be like coming out of the closet to your parents and having them respond with “Well, duh.” Which actually happened to a chick I knew in college. This was that level of embarrassing. I tried again. “You’re missing the point. We’re not pretend vampires, we’re the real deal.
We drink blood, we have fangs, we live underground in a cemetery, for crying out loud!”

  “Sure, and I bet if I look in your crisper I’ll find bags of blood from some orderly you bribed at a hospital, right? And I don’t see any fangs. And I haven’t seen any indication of superhuman strength, speed, or any other vampire…” She trailed off because I’d bounded across the room in one step and picked her up over my head, chair and all. With one hand.

  “You were mentioning strength? And speed?” I lowered her to the floor and leaned in close, fangs on display. “And I think you were looking for these pointy bits?”

  She nodded, her mouth opening and closing like a flounder on the deck of a fishing boat, and I went back to my seat, retracting my fangs as I went. “We keep the fangs tucked away until we need them, because they make it hard to talk, and they tend to cut our lips if we leave them out all the time. Not to mention the name of the game is to hide what we are. And yes, we do indeed bribe an orderly for our blood supply, but if pressed we can certainly take our meals on the hoof, as it were. Greg pretty much never eats take out, but every so often I feel the need for a nibble. It reminds me exactly where I stand on the food pyramid – at the absolute top. Now do you believe me?”

  She looked from me to Mike and back to me again. She shook herself slightly and refocused on Mike. “But I thought you were a priest? And I thought vampires couldn’t tolerate holy symbols, or holy ground? So how do you live here?”

  Mike laughed and leaned back in his chair. “Oh dear me, no! I’m not a vampire. I’m just a priest. Jimmy and Greg and I grew up together, and we’ve been friends for far too long to let a little thing like turning into the living dead get in the way!” She relaxed a little, probably relieved to know that we have a friend that we haven’t eaten.

  “But wait, if you two grew up together, then that means you’re…” she stumbled with trying to find a polite way to say it.

  “Older than I look. Yeah, we’re all about the same age, give or take a year. Mike’s the oldest, but we’re all pushing forty. Fringe benefit of being dead – you don’t age.”

  “So you’re really vampires? You and the pudgy one?”

  “Yep, and please don’t mention the weight thing – he’s sensitive.”

  “And you really drink blood?”

  “Yep.”

  “And you really can’t go out in the sunlight?”

  “Poof!” I confirmed.

  “Holy symbols?”

  “Bad juju?”

  “Stakes?”

  “Dead as doornails.”

  “Decapitation?”

  “Ruins our night forever.”

  “Garlic?”

  “Total myth. I love Italians.”

  “Running water?”

  “I shower every day, so running water is not an issue.”

  “Silver?”

  “Hurts, but doesn’t kill. I’ve never been shot with a silver bullet, and it’s not an experiment that I’d care to try.”

  “How?”

  “How what?” I figured we’d get to this question eventually. I wasn’t really crazy about the answer, but it was going to come out, and I did kinda promise full disclosure.”

  “How did you two become vampires?”

  “That’s a long story.”

  “Well, I think I have all day. Because I’m not leaving until my curiosity is satisfied, and I don’t think you’re going anywhere until sundown.”

  “Alright, but I’m gonna need another drink.” So I went to get more liquor, and a fresh beer for the lady, and settled in to tell her our story.

  Chapter 27

  “So I guess I should start at the beginning. My name is James Knight, and I was born in 1974, right here in Charlotte. I’ve always preferred Jimmy, though, so feel free to call me that. Greg and I met in junior high school and were best friends ever since. We met on the first day of school when we were both in seventh grade. It wasn’t exactly what you’d call the most auspicious of meetings – we were jammed into lockers after gym class by a couple of jocks-in-training.

  “I’ve always been this skinny, and Greg has always been a little heavy, so middle school was rough, to say the least. We were those kids in the corner of the lunchroom, invisible unless you needed someone to pick on. The guys who spent all their recess time playing Dungeons & Dragons in the library instead of doing anything to dispel their ghostly pallor. Come to think of it, we weren’t real fond of direct sunlight even before we were turned.” I gave a little chuckle at that, but the detective didn’t seem amused. Good to see my sense of humor is still killin’ with the ladies after all these years.

  “Greg and I were best friends, along with Mikey here, all through middle and high school. We were pretty inseparable, even built a treehouse in Mike’s back yard. That didn’t work out so well, because we were all kinda brainy kids, without a shop class between us, so our treehouse didn’t last through the first big rainstorm. Even worse, we were inside it when it came tumbling to the ground. But we were a modern-day Three Musketeers, tied together by lack of athletic ability and lack of enough common sense to shut up when the football boys were picking on us.

  “We made it through high school with just the normal assortment of angst, self-loathing and wedgies, and off we went to college. Greg and I went to Clemson together, deciding to room together in one of the dorms with a bunch of engineering majors to cut down on the beatings we had to endure. Mike went off to seminary, and we didn’t see him again until a whole lot of things had changed.”

  I looked over at Mike, and he gave me a slight nod. There was a lot I wasn’t saying to the nice police lady, especially about a big fight the three of us had right before high school graduation when Mike told Greg and I that he wasn’t coming to Clemson with us. He’d gotten his calling late in our senior year, and pretty much kept it to himself until we were making plans for our beach trip after graduation. I’d been really upset with him for breaking up The Musketeers, as I referred to the three of us, and had said some pretty unkind things, including that I never wanted to see him again for the rest of my life. I didn’t. I’m not sure that he’s ever forgiven me for that. I haven’t.

  “Our first year of college was fantastic. We were finally around other people that were bigger nerds than us, and it was great. I was actually one of the cool kids in the dorm, because I had a fake ID and could buy beer. It was possibly the worst fake ID in history, as it showed a picture of a fifty-year-old black Vietnam Vet named Harold, but none of the grocery store clerks around campus cared back then. So we navigated college without much in the way of physical abuse, because it’s a lot easier to hide when there are a few thousand other math dorks around.

  “Greg got a degree in computer engineering, and I managed to flunk, cut, drop and incomplete my way to a BA in English with a minor in Psychology. I had no idea what I wanted to do except drink beer and play video games, but there’s not a degree path in that, so I thought English would be the next best thing. I looked at theatre for a while, but I like girls and I didn’t smoke enough weed, so English it was.

  “We’d just graduated in May of 1996 when I ran into a spectacularly hot chick in a bar not far from campus. Now this wasn’t the average college town hottie, this girl was Playboy hot. And for some reason, she was interested in me. Not one to look a gift horse in the mouth, I brought her back to our apartment after plying her with enough cheap beer to float an offensive lineman. Of course, things probably would have worked out very differently if I had looked her in the mouth, but that would have ruined the story, wouldn’t it?

  “So we got involved, and then we got very involved. And just as I was about to reach the peak of my involvement…”

  “I get it.” Interjected Detective Law, with a slightly pained expression on her face.

  “Sorry. Sometimes I’m a tad inappropriate. Comes with the teeth. Anyway, just at that special moment, she bit me. And I’m not talking a love nip. I’m talking a fangs-out, attack the carotid, drain yo
u dry kinda bite. Now I don’t think this is the time or place to discuss the, um, finer points of the effect of a vampire bite on the erogenous zones of the human body, but let it suffice to say that while it scared the crap out of me, it also heightened the pleasure to the point of deliriousness.”

  “Are you saying you…” Detective Law trailed off, looking unsure of how to continue.

  “Yep. Right as I died. Made for an embarrassing corpse, I’m sure, but that wasn’t my concern until quite a while later. So she drained me, in more ways than one, and left me there, on my couch.”

  “The couch? Not even in the bedroom?”

  “Sorry to offend your sensibilities, Detective, but people do occasionally have sex in other places than the bedroom. And we were in a hurry. I thought she was in a hurry for my sweet lovin’, and I was in a hurry to score with the hottest girl I’d ever spoken to before she realized how out of my league she really was. So she left me there, dead and naked from the waist down on my couch, which was how Greg found me a few hours later. And don’t think that hasn’t made for a few awkward moments in the last fifteen years.”