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

  “Wait…hours? It only takes hours for the…whatever you call it to happen?”

  “Apparently. I’ve only turned one person, and that one took all day to process and wake up, but I don’t know if that was because I turned him near sunrise, or because I was a very young vampire when I turned him, or because of some other reason that I don’t know about.”

  “Who did you turn?” I just looked at her. “Oh.”

  “Yeah. Oh. Greg got home a couple of hours after she’d killed me, and found my dead, naked body on the couch in front of the television. According to his account of events, he didn’t even notice I was dead, or naked for that matter, until he threw a Nintendo remote to me to play a video game and it bounced off my face. He freaked out and started screaming like a little girl, which is why he went to bed rather than hear me tell this story again. It paints him in a less than macho light, and Greg is very concerned about appearances.

  “So after he calmed down enough to stop screaming, he checked me for a pulse, and the went to look for the cordless phone and call the police. When he touched my neck, I snapped awake. I could feel his pulse through his fingertips, and I could almost hear his blood calling to me. So I woke up, conscious but not really in control of myself, and when I saw him on the phone trying to remember the number for 911, I snuck up behind him and drained him dry in the middle of the efficiency kitchen in our off-campus apartment.”

  That was a vast oversimplification of things, but she didn’t need to know everything. She didn’t need to know how sweet the blood tasted right from the spring, how amazing and hot and rich it felt as it went down my throat, taking my dead flesh and pouring life into it. It felt like I was forcing his blood down into my desiccated veins, and with every beat of his heart I could feel myself getting stronger, more alive than I had ever been. Everything around me had new color, every sound was crisper, every smell sharper, and the taste was like the most incredible wine and steak and chocolate all rolled into one set of overwhelming sensations.

  And as I felt the life drain out of my best friend I didn’t care at all about what I was taking away from him, so focused was I on what I was getting out of the exchange. I could hear his heartbeat slowing in my ears, could feel the pulse in his veins getting weaker and weaker with every minute I stayed latched onto him like a pit bull with a t-bone. And I didn’t care. I didn’t care that I was killing my best friend. I didn’t care that I was drinking the life right from his throat like a comic book monster. All I cared about was how amazing it felt.

  The pretty detective with the adorable brown curls didn’t need to know just how much like sex it was to drink someone’s blood. And she certainly didn’t need to know how much that hunger, the almost overwhelming desire to taste fresh blood every night or two kept me up at night. And how much harder it got every year to keep the hunger locked away. So I glossed over the finer points of the murder of my childhood friend and roommate, and skipped ahead a few hours.

  “By the time I had drank my fill, Greg was dead. I drained him completely, and kept drinking until there wasn’t a spare drop lurking in his veins. Even with that, I was still half-crazy with hunger, but I managed to pull myself together enough to realize what I’d done. At least part of it. I really freaked out then, trashing the apartment and generally losing my mind for a couple of hours. The only reason I lived through the morning was because I felt too awful about what I’d done to leave Greg’s body behind. If I’d run out looking for more food I would have burnt to cinders before I found breakfast.

  “So I spent a few hours alternating between screaming at myself and weeping like a schoolgirl who just found out that the quarterback she gave it up to doesn’t really love her. And eventually I fell asleep. The combination of dying and coming back to life, coupled with the stress of killing my best friend in the world really took it out of me, I guess. I crashed on the floor next to Greg’s body for a few hours, and when I woke up it was the next night.

  “I flipped my lid again when I woke up and remembered what I’d done, and I cried some more, and hugged his body, and tore up the apartment some more, and cursed myself some more, and generally behaved like the kind of angst-ridden bloodsucker that boring movies are made of. It was during one of the more stereotypical periods of weeping and hugging my dead best friend that his eyes opened. And it was a good thing I had died the night before, because he scared me half to death. He looked up at me, crying my guts out, and said…”

  “Dude, if you’re trying to tell me you’re gay, I already know.” Greg said from the doorway to his bedroom. I’m not sure how much of my little retelling he had been standing there for, but he had a strangely solemn look on his face as he dragged a kitchen chair over next to me and sat backwards on it, leaning over the back of the chair facing Detective Law. “I opened my eyes, and here’s this goofy bastard weeping like Old Yeller just died, and I was hungrier than I’d ever been in my life. And as you might have guessed, I liked to eat.”

  I decided to let Greg pick up the thread of the narrative here, because I wasn’t sure why he’d been listening in. After all, he lived through the whole thing, or, I guess to be more specific, he didn’t. But he was familiar with the story. Anyway, he went on. “I was starving, so I tossed Jimmy off of me and headed straight for the fridge. I might have made some comment about him being a massive slob and that I was not going to clean up his mess this time, but I don’t really remember. I just remember opening the fridge and sticking my face in a bucket of fried chicken without even bothering to heat it up in the microwave. That turned out to be a really bad choice, since I was no longer able to process solid food.

  “Fortunately, I was in the kitchen, so I was able to make it to the sink before the entire contents of my stomach came up in a spectacular mess. That left me hungrier than ever, and I could smell something coming from the living room, and it smelled good. I went in there to see what was for dinner, and the only thing there was Jimmy.”

  I picked up the thread here. “By now I’d figured out a little about what was going on, and I had opened a vein in my wrist for Greg. I figured if he was anywhere near as hungry as me, we weren’t going to be able to do anything until he had some blood, and I also thought I could probably spare enough to get him going. So he latched on like a lamprey to my arm and starting sucking on my wrist like he was trying to get a golf ball through a garden hose.”

  “You know, English major or not, you can come up with some of the most ridiculous turns of phrase I’ve ever heard.” Detective Law chimed in.

  “Really? I’m baring my soul here about becoming one of the living dead, and I’m getting a lit crit lesson from a cop? I’m just going to pretend that never happened. So Greg drank from my arm, and when I started to feel my strength lessen a bit, I pulled him off me. It wasn’t easy, and there might have been a frying pan involved, but I got him off my arm. A few seconds later, he calmed down, and I explained to him what I thought had happened.”

  “This theory of Jimmy’s, while based in no real scientific fact at the time, has been borne out by both empirical and anecdotal evidence in the years hence.” Greg took over again while I went for another round of drinks. “Basically, the trait of vampirism is only passed on when the donor is drained completely. If the heart doesn’t stop, the donor does not become a vampire.”

  “And I’m sure all the ‘donors’ are volunteers,” Detective Law interrupted.

  “Let’s not split hairs, Detective. I’ll admit that the terminology is one we have adopted to make ourselves feel better, but the facts of the situation remain. We must drink human blood to live, and we are very interested in continuing to live. Therefore, we will continue to drink human blood.”

  “What about animal blood,” she asked. “Does it work?”

  “No,” I answered. “Aside from tasting worse than New Coke, apparently there are nutrients in human blood that we don’t get from animals. Now we haven’t tried gorillas, or animals that are all that close to humans genetically, b
ut since I don’t like picking fur out of my teeth anyway, after a few experiments with rabbits and cats we gave up on animals. And I wasn’t much of a pet guy when I was alive, so being dead has done nothing to increase my desire for a fluffy puppy.”

  “And for myself, I have all I can handle trying to domesticate Jimmy, so I’ve never bothered to try to have a pet. But back to the story. In short, I fed from Jimmy, and then we went out to top off the tank, as it were. We didn’t drain those first donors completely, more out of satiation than out of any moral compunction against killing them. We just got full. Once we were thinking clearly, we realized that killing a bunch of random people would be a good way to get caught, and that would probably lead to unpleasant things happening in government laboratories, so we went for a more low-profile route.” There was a lot more to those first few nights than Greg was sharing, but even Mike didn’t know much about what we did when we first turned, and I was content to keep all that between the two of us.

  “But what did you do about your families? I mean, you guys had jobs, relatives, friends… What did you do about that?”

  “That’s where I come in,” said Mike. “By the time the boys became bloodsucking fiends of the night, I had graduated from seminary and was working as an assistant priest here in town. One night, as I was locking up the fellowship hall, a pair of familiar figures came to me looking for a favor.”

  Chapter 28

  “The boys were understandably nervous approaching me, as I am a man of the cloth and they are unholy fiends, but I put our long friendship ahead of pesky quibbles about all our immortal souls and decided to lend a hand.” Mike said, taking a long pull of his scotch. “I was staying in a small apartment the church provided a few blocks from the church, so we went there to work out the finer points of the unlife the boys were embarking upon.

  “That night was certainly educational for all of us. I learned that not only do vampires exist, but my two oldest friends had joined their ranks, and they learned that they really are unable to enter an apartment uninvited.” I remembered Mike playing with us for a few minutes at the threshold to his place, then inviting Greg in and leaving me outside in the hallway. He came back for me a few minutes later, but he definitely left us cooling our heels for a few long minutes while we hoped that he didn’t have a nosy neighbor lady. Turned out he did, but I ate her, so she wasn’t much of a problem. That night, anyway.

  “The boys also learned that they have issues with holy ground, and holy symbols, but those seem to be more psychological than pathological. The discomfort that they experience around objects of faith is dramatically different from the type of pain that is inflicted by sunlight, and the nausea they experience on holy ground is nothing like the barricade they experience when they attempt to enter a dwelling uninvited. So it’s long been my theory that there is no reason that Jimmy and Greg can’t touch a cross, for example, or enter a church without any ill effects. No reason other than their own subconscious fear that they may have lost their souls when they became vampires, that is. And after these past years of working alongside them, helping people at every opportunity, I can assure you, they have every bit as much of their souls as you or I have.”

  “I don’t care about their souls, Father. I’m more concerned with their conscience and their abilities.” The detective didn’t look terribly convinced by Mike’s assertions of our sainthood. I didn’t blame her, I guess.

  “Well, hopefully a little more of my story will convince you of their intentions, my lady.” Mike went on. “After the boys convinced me of what they had become, we concocted a tragic automobile accident to explain their passing. We managed to drive their car into Lake Hartwell after a heavy rain, which guaranteed that the car would not be recovered for several days. By that time, the boys had been reported missing (by me of course), and when there were no bodies found in the car, it was assumed that they had washed out by the elevated water levels in the lake and may never be found. They weren’t, of course. Their families were suitably grief-stricken, their funerals were lovely, and I had the great honor of eulogizing my childhood friends.”

  Mike looked down at his hands, which shook a little as he told that part of the story. “I always hated lying to their parents, but I took some small consolation in the fact that the boys were, in fact, dead. So while the circumstances around their passing was significantly different, the cold fact was that I was telling the truth: my friends were dead.”

  I picked up the thread of the narrative here. “While Mike was building our cover story, Greg and I were learning how to be vampires. We didn’t have any grand cloaked mentor to tell us what we could and couldn’t do - we had to figure it all out on our own. It didn’t take long to realize that we couldn’t drink from each other except in emergencies. Not only because we’ve never been that kind of friends, but because it wasn’t getting us anything. One person holds enough blood to keep one body running. Trying to feed two vampires off of one blood supply makes for two very weak vampires. Now one weak vampire is still stronger and faster than the best human athlete, but we figured out pretty quickly that we have to eat. And we have to eat every couple of days, at least.”

  “But we didn’t drain anyone.” Greg said quickly. “I figured out that the reason Jimmy had turned me was because he drained me completely, so we were careful only to take enough blood to keep us full, and never enough to do any permanent damage. We discovered that vamp bites heal super-fast, so as long as they didn’t try to operate heavy machinery too soon after we fed, our donors never suffered any adverse effects. And after a few weeks we made a connection at the blood bank, so then we just bought a few pints. He figured we were just some goth kids with an Anne Rice fixation, so he didn’t ask any questions.

  “Then Mike pulled a few strings and got us the caretaker gig here, and we’ve been doing it this way ever since. After a few years of chasing girls and biting them, we got bored and started a detective agency. We try to stay quiet about our operation, but enough people find us to keep us pretty much out of trouble and we make enough cash to pay off our blood bank connection.” Greg and I looked over at the detective. This was more of our story than we’d told anyone, and the look on her face was inscrutable. I couldn’t tell if we’d made an ally or given a lot of information to someone who could be very, very dangerous.

  Detective Law finished off her beer, motioned to Greg to bring her another, and she leaned back in her chair. It was a long moment before anyone spoke, and when she did, the rest of us leaned in to hear what she had to say. “Alright, so you’re vampires. And you’re detectives. And you try to help people. But you still drink blood. And you don’t like crosses, but garlic isn’t a big deal. Silver is a pain, but running water has no effect. You can’t enter a home uninvited, and you don’t like holy ground. As far as you know a stake through the heart will kill you, and ditto for decapitation. Sunlight is bad, but that’s about all that can hurt you. You’ve been here doing this for years, and before tonight the only person you’ve let in on your little secret is your boyhood friend and alibi, Father Mike. Have I pretty much hit the highlights?”

  “Yeah,” I said, “That pretty much covers it, using broad brush strokes. But we do know for a fact that stakes and decapitation will kill vampires.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Don’t ask silly questions, Detective. You’re way too smart for that.”

  “Fair enough. And I suppose you can call me Sabrina. After all, I know more about you than I ever really wanted to know, so I suppose we should be on a first-name basis.”

  “So now you know our story. And while I enjoy your company more than any living woman in nearly twenty years, I’m tired. And I’m going to bed. I’ll be up sometime around sundown and we’ll figure out what we’re going to do about finding our last escaped soul and sending her back to Hell before she causes any more trouble.” Greg yawned and mumbled his agreement, and headed off to his room.

  Mike stood and gathered his things. “A
s much as I like you boys, your housekeeping leaves much to be desired. So I shall retire to my parish house and get a little shuteye myself.”

  “What about me?” Sabrina asked.

  “What about you?” I asked right back. “We’re getting some sleep. I suggest you do the same. Go home, Sabrina. Get a nap, get some fresh clothes, and meet us back here at sundown. You know we won’t be going anywhere until nightfall, so you don’t have to worry about us leaving you out.”

  “Alright, but if you try to shut me out of this, I’ll show back up here at noon tomorrow and give you a stake dinner you’ll never forget. Deal?” She stood and stuck out her hand. I stood up, too, because that’s just how I was raised.

  I took her hand and shook. Her skin was so warm against mine, so alive that for just a minute I really, really missed being alive. “Deal.” I stood there and watched her walk up the steps and into the sunlight, and felt the darkness slam into my chest as she closed the door behind her.