All Knight Long Page 6

  He shoved me once more into the ambulance and took a step back. He didn’t take his eyes off me, like he expected me to throw a punch. I was tempted, but he was right. I was being a dick, and deserved to get thrown around a little bit. I was probably even asking for it. I just didn’t expect him to be the one to sack up and do it.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  His head snapped up and he stared at me, like he was looking for the punchline. “What?”

  “I said I’m sorry. You’re right. I was just pissed.”

  “Yeah, well . . . I’m pissed, too,” he grumbled, but most of his fire was gone.

  “Good. I wouldn’t want you partnered with my girlfriend if you weren’t.”

  “If you two are done hugging it out, can I take her to the morgue?” Bobby stepped around the side of the ambulance with a clipboard. “Who wants to sign her over?”

  Sabrina took the paperwork and started flipping through, scribbling on the bottom of several pages. Fitzpatrick looked up at me. “I don’t see what she likes about you, Black.”

  “That’s okay, Sean. I think you’re a dork,” I said, completely sincere.

  “We’ll find who did this. I’m not going to let this slide. I wasn’t kidding. My daughter is barely older than her. This one hits home.”

  “I didn’t know you had a daughter,” Greg said, trying to defuse the dick-measuring contest.

  “I don’t get to see her much. She’s in college at Penn State, and her mom and I split up a long time ago. But she’s why I’m here.”

  “I don’t follow,” Greg said. “We aren’t anywhere close to Penn State.”

  “A lot closer than Denver. This was the biggest city on the East Coast with an opening for a homicide detective when she was starting school. I didn’t want to be too close, you know? Didn’t want to seem smothering. But I wanted to be closer. In the same time zone, at least.” He smiled a little, but this wasn’t the normal, peppy, dumb puppy smile I was used to seeing out of Fitzpatrick. It was a fleeting thing, a tenuous smile that told me he was crazy about his kid, but he didn’t see her often at all.

  “Makes sense, Detective,” I said. I stuck out my hand. “We cool?”

  “I still don’t like PIs,” he said. Then he took my hand and we shook. “But we’re as cool as we can be.”

  “Dude, my girlfriend doesn’t like PIs. I’ve never met a cop that does. Now, I’m going to ride to the morgue with the body, and Greg is going to go with you two to notify the mother. That way there will be someone she knows with her the whole time.” I pushed my words on Fitzpatrick, and he nodded like he just randomly let civilians ride around with murder victims all the time. “You won’t remember that I rode with the body, but you won’t think it’s strange when you see me again at the hospital.”

  Bobby and Sabrina finished the paperwork, and he tossed the clipboard on top of the stretcher. I picked it up. “She’s not furniture, Bobby.”

  He looked up at me, his brown eyes wide. I could almost see the protest start to form in his face, but he nodded and took the paperwork from me. He walked around to the front seat of the ambulance, and Sabrina and I loaded Julia’s body into the back. I climbed in beside her, and Bobby closed me in. A few seconds later, I heard the driver’s door close, and he looked back between the seats at me.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  “Not really,” I said. “She’s going to turn, Bobby. And that won’t be pretty.”

  “I know. I was around when Abby woke up, remember?” I did remember, even though that seemed like a lifetime ago. Abby was killed and drained by the same vampire that turned me, making us siblings in some weird vampire logic. My sister killed our dam a few days later, which started us down the road that led to her killing Gordon Tiram then abdicating the title of Master of the City to me. I really hoped this kid wasn’t going to be anywhere near that much trouble.

  I should have known better.

  Chapter 9

  “WHAT DO YOU want me to do, Jimmy?” Bobby asked from the driver’s seat.

  “Kill the lights and find a place to park for a little bit.”

  “Any suggestions for that? This isn’t exactly the most inconspicuous vehicle, and I’m not used to driving around trying not to be noticed.” I looked in the mirror at him, and saw the little grin tweaking the corners of the big man’s chocolate face.

  I shook my head, and a slight chuckle escaped despite the situation. “Go to our place. Just park in the driveway. Greg’s looking for more information on the murder, Sabrina’s doing paperwork and waiting for the techs to process the scene, and Abby’s at the Angel. Nobody’s home to get worried about an ambulance parked on our lawn.”

  “Sounds good, boss.” He pulled the ambulance into traffic, and I sat on one of the benches that ran the length of the ambulance’s interior, looking at the black plastic-wrapped form of the girl. I took a deep breath and opened the body bag. The big industrial zipper made a ripping sound as it pulled down, and Julia’s face and body slowly came into view.

  She was a pretty girl. Not model gorgeous, but not bad looking, either. Cute, I guess you’d say. Her dark hair framed her face well, and her skin was smooth. There was a bruise on her left cheekbone, and I could barely see the impressions of knuckles on her flesh. So the asshole that killed her beat her up a little, too. Nice.

  I unzipped the bag all the way, then looked up at Bobby. “You didn’t cuff her? I sent word—”

  “Yeah, you sent word, but I can’t exactly handcuff a dead body with a dozen uniforms around, Jimmy. And I don’t work for you, remember? I gotta do my job before I can help you do yours.” The recrimination was heavy in his words, and I flinched a little. He was right, though. Keeping the vampire and other supernatural creatures in line was my job, and I failed. I failed this girl, and she was dead because of it. Master of the City didn’t mean shit tonight.

  Fuck. I slammed my hand into the padded bench beside me, and felt the metal crunch beneath my fist. “Yeah, that makes sense,” was all I said. “Can you toss me the silver cuffs?”

  A pair of handcuffs flew back into the ambulance, and I picked them up. Then dropped them immediately as the silver seared my skin. “Sonofabitch! Can I get a pair of gloves?”

  “Over your head,” Bobby called, not turning around. I couldn’t see the little smile on his face, but I knew it was there. I extended a middle finger to the back of his head, then stood up and pulled a pair of latex gloves out of a bin on the wall. I slipped on the gloves, then clicked the cuffs around the dead girl’s right wrist, securing her to the gurney and making sure that if she did wake up before I was ready for her, she’d at least be weakened by the silver. Baby vamps usually aren’t that strong, but they’re almost always batshit crazy from blood-hunger, and I didn’t fancy wrestling in the back of a moving ambulance.

  “What do you have on time of death?” I asked.

  “It’s a little hard to tell, because it’s cold out tonight, but I’m guessing anywhere from four to twelve hours.”

  “Shit,” I said.

  “What?”

  “It usually only takes about eight hours for a new vamp to wake up. I wanted to get a chance to check her for smells or trace before she—” I was going to say “woke up,” but that’s exactly what Julia did, right in the middle of my sentence. Eight hours it is. That put the time of death right around eight o’clock. Good to know. Except I now had bigger problems on my hands. Like a wide-awake baby vampire, out of her mind from dying and hunger.

  Except she wasn’t. I mean, for all I could tell, she was out of her mind, but she wasn’t doing any of the stuff I’d come to expect from newborns. Or newdeads, I guess. She wasn’t screaming, thrashing around, trying to rip the cuffs off, or trying to bite me or Bobby. She just lay there on the gurney, her eyes open, looking up at me.

  I watched her w
atch me for a few seconds, but patience has never been my strong suit. “Julia?”

  “Yes,” she said. Okay, she’s awake and aware. That’s weird. “Am I dead?”

  “That’s a bigger question than you might think,” I said. “Let me check a couple of things, okay?” I found a stethoscope in another bin on the wall and pressed it to her chest. Nothing. I pressed it to the side of her neck, with the expected identical results.

  I sat back down, out of reach of her left arm but between her and Bobby in case shit went sideways. “Yeah, you’re dead,” I said. I watched for any of the expected reactions, but nothing came. No tears, no yelling, and still no thrashing around.

  “I thought so,” she said. “I mean, why else would you be asking about time of death? Who are you? Are you . . . an angel?”

  Bobby’s snort of laughter from the front seat cut any kind of tenderness out of the moment, right there. “Yeah, not so much.” I looked at the girl, all of eighteen years old and now doomed to stay that way forever. This was not how her life was supposed to go. Of course, it’s not like she was the only person in the ambulance who could say that. Bobby was supposed to be a third-round draft pick and career NFL backup. Instead he ends up with a hurt knee, three years of Arena Football, and a gig driving an ambulance and selling blood out the back door of the hospital to a vampire.

  I was supposed to be a mechanical engineer, laying out air conditioning systems for high rises. Instead, I found myself perpetually twenty-two, drinking blood out of a bag to stay alive, and managing a mildly dysfunctional criminal pseudo-empire. Yeah, Julia had plenty of company in the “this is not how shit is supposed to go” department. But Bobby and I weren’t in high school. We weren’t staring down the barrel of a promising life. And now, neither was Julia.

  “This is going to sound weird, and that might be the biggest understatement in the history of history. But I’m a vampire. And now, so are you.”

  That’s usually the part where people start to freak out. The realization that monsters are real, then the double whammy that they’re one of them. But this conversation was quickly diverging from the usual, even for my weird-ass life.

  “Huh,” she said. “Well, that’s gonna screw my early admission to Duke, then, isn’t it?” She looked around the back of the ambulance. “Am I in a body bag? Oh shit, I guess I would be, wouldn’t I? Oh, I think I gotta puke.”

  “Yeah, that’s pretty normal,” I said. I looked around the cramped compartment, found a plastic bag, then handed it to Julia.

  She leaned over the guardrail of the gurney, and I held her hair back as she unloaded the entire contents of her stomach into the bag. She handed it back to me, an apologetic half-smile on her face. “Sorry. That was pretty gross.”

  “Yeah, I’ve seen worse.” I tied off the bag and dumped it into one of the containers marked “Hazardous Waste”. I looked at the girl, who was tugging at the handcuffs with a quizzical look on her face.

  “This thing hurts. Like, it burns a little. Can we . . . ?”

  “Yeah,” I said, fishing my keys out of my pocket. Carrying a handcuff key became the norm for me after my girlfriend cuffed me to a bowling alley chair. It was a pain in the ass, dragging the chair around behind me for an hour after I ripped the seat off the base, so I just took to carrying a key.

  “Thanks,” Julia said, freeing her wrist and rubbing the burned circle of skin. “What’s up with that?”

  “Silver,” I said, pocketing the key as she handed it back to me. “Saps our strength and burns our skin. Most newborn vampires wake up really hungry and kinda nuts. I didn’t want to get in a big fight in the back of Bobby’s ambulance—”

  “Again,” Bobby called from the front seat.

  “Again,” I concurred. “So I cuffed you. That might be why you woke up more slowly, and less ready to tear my head off.”

  “I’m still pretty hungry, though.” She craned her neck around to look at the back of Bobby’s head. “He smells good.”

  “Hands off,” I said. I dug a bag of blood out of an overhead container and pitched it to her. “Rip the end off that and suck it down, instead. Not as tasty, but less mess and less chance of wrecking the ambulance.

  “On that note,” Bobby said, “we’re here. Gimme your keys. I’m gonna wait inside while y’all figure your shit out.”

  “Door code is 021229,” I said. “That’ll unlock the visitor areas and keep you out of anyplace that might kill you.”

  “Works for me,” the big man said. I heard the front door open and close as he removed himself from the dinner conversation.

  “What was he talking about?” Julia asked.

  “What do you mean, what was he talking about?”

  “He said we had shit to figure out. What kind of shit do we have to figure out?”

  This chick was smart. She knew something was up. “We have to figure out if I’m going to kill you or not. For real and for good this time.”

  “Why would you do that?” I could see the fear in her eyes as she sat up and scooted back along the gurney, clutching the bag of blood to her chest so tight I began to fear the bag would explode.

  I took a deep breath, then let it out. “It’s your call, honestly. I was just going to check your body for trace evidence, anything that could lead me to your sire, then stake you before you woke up, and go find the asshole that made a vampire in my city without permission and explain to him the error of his ways. Permanently. But then you woke up. And now you’re a problem.”

  “Why am I a problem? I haven’t hurt anybody. I don’t want to hurt anybody. I just want to live my life, like normal.”

  “And therein lies the problem. Your life isn’t just over as you know it, it’s over. You’re dead. No pulse, nothing. You’re alive by some kind of magical force that nobody I’ve ever found understands, and you will hurt people. You have to. You need blood to stay alive. That’s not an option. Animal blood will do it, for a while, but the desire, the need for human blood, will eventually win out. When that happens, you’ll either make an arrangement with someone like Bobby, you’ll learn to hunt and sip from your victims, or you’ll kill someone. Then I’ll find out, and I’ll have to hunt you down. Then we’re right back here talking about me killing you.”

  “Who the hell do you think you are?” Her voice started to climb, and she started to stand up in the cramped ambulance. “Some kind of vampire police? Some kind of vampire king? Well, I’m not going to—”

  “Sit Down.” I clapped both hands on her shoulders and sat her butt back down on the gurney with authority. “Let me clarify. I’m Jimmy Black. I’m no king, but I am the Master Vampire of this city, and you are now my responsibility. So you can sit there, and we can talk about what we’re going to do with you, or we can throw down, and you can end up with a stake through your heart. Your call.”

  She sat there staring daggers at me for a long moment, until I finally remembered that there was no way I was going to out-glare a teenaged girl, and broke the silence. “What’s it going to be, Julia? You gonna talk, or you gonna die?”

  Chapter 10

  SHE TOOK A BIG gulp of air, looked at me with wide eyes, and said, “Umm . . . can we talk?”

  I leaned back against the bench, keeping an eye on her but giving her a little space. “Sure. What do you want to talk about?”

  “Well . . . I mean, what’s it like?”

  “Being a vampire?”

  “Yeah. I mean, how long have you been . . .”

  “Dead?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Longer than you’ve been alive. I was turned in 1995, right after I graduated from Clemson. So, a little over twenty years now.”

  “Oh.” I could see the various half-formed questions running through her mind, but I sat there waiting to see what came next. This was new to me—a coherent newborn va
mp. Greg had been completely nuts when he turned, and I hadn’t had any idea what was happening with him, either. When Abby turned, I knew what was happening, but she was still out of her mind with hunger. Whatever was keeping Julia sane, if it was some kind of aura that I put off now that I was Master of the City or if she was just less nuts in general than my two friends, I welcomed it. Her speech was a little slow, almost like someone talking through hypnosis, but if it kept her from trying to kill me, I could deal with some sluggish speech.

  After almost a full minute of sorting her thoughts, Julia locked eyes with me. “You said we have to have human blood, right?”

  “Yeah. At least a little bit every few days. More, if you want to stay at peak strength and energy, but we don’t need to drink every day, and we don’t have to drain the people we drink from.”

  “So, I don’t have to kill anybody?”

  “No. We’re kinda like remoras. We ride along the population, draining a few nutrients here and there, but not taking enough to hurt the host.”

  “So, we’re parasites.”

  “Yeah, pretty much.”

  “You really know how to take the romance out of becoming a vampire, don’t you?”

  “I’m not here to seduce you, Julia. I’m here to teach you how to not get true-dead.” Shit. As soon as I said it, I realized I meant it. I cared about this kid. It would have been easy enough to stake her before she woke up, but now that I’d talked to her. . . . Well, maybe she’d turn out fine. Greg and Abby were okay. All right, maybe Greg was a giant nerd, but he was like that in life. And Abby was a little amoral, but not too bad.