All Knight Long Page 7

  “True-dead?”

  “Staked through the heart, head cut off, set on fire . . . that sort of thing really does kill us. We’re immortal, but not invulnerable. True-dead is what we call it when you die for the last time. There’s no coming back from that.”

  “Sunlight?” Her voice got small, thinking about the new dangers in her world. This was a big adjustment, figuring out what could and couldn’t hurt or kill you in this new life. I sympathized, but I didn’t let it show. She didn’t need sympathy, she needed information.

  “Yeah, it’ll set you off like a Roman Candle. Your days of tanning at Myrtle Beach are over. Sorry.”

  “I hate that place. It’s like a giant Walmart with cocoa butter.”

  I laughed, a short bark that came out unexpectedly. “You ain’t wrong there, kiddo.” I sobered up as I watched a shadow flicker across her face. “What is it?”

  “I’m always going to be a kid now.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “And some of that is awesome, but a lot of it sucks. I get a lot of shit from my girlfriend’s co-workers about her robbing the cradle, when she’s half a decade younger than me. But I’ll look twenty- two forever.”

  “I guess there are worse things. But I’m going to get carded at bars until the end of time. That blows.”

  “If it helps, I know a guy who makes the best fake IDs in North Carolina.” I didn’t bother telling her that the guy was my best friend and roommate. Greg had all that holographic printing stuff down cold, but I tried to keep that little sideline as hidden as possible.

  “So, I’m never going to age?”

  “Nope.”

  “And I can never go out in the sun?”

  “Well, you can . . . ,” I said, knowing it was a touch cruel to let the hope blossom in her eyes like that. “Once.”

  Her face fell. “You’re a little bit of a dick.”

  “More than a little bit, kid.” I sat up straighter and locked eyes with her. “I’m a lot of a dick. Like I said, I’m the Master Vampire of this city, and that means that the well-being of every supernatural creature in Charlotte is my responsibility. I take that responsibility very seriously, so understand that I’m not just a dick, I’m the judge, jury, and if need be executioner for every vampire, werewolf, witch, and fairie in this town. If you step out of line, I’m the one who gives you the warning. And if you step out of line again, I’m the last thing you ever see.”

  The more I talked, the further back she scooted along the gurney until she was bunched up against the thin partition separating us from the driver’s seat. She sat there, looking at me with fear written across every inch of her face and her bottom lip trembling while I tried to hold the stern look on my face. I felt like a giant asshole for scaring the crap out of this little girl, but she had to know that her new life was a scary one, full of people who didn’t care if she lived or died. I did care, but for her sake, she had to think I didn’t.

  The moment stretched into what felt like eternity, then the back door of the ambulance opened and my night really went to shit.

  “Hey, Jimmy. I got another call, I gotta—” Bobby pulled the door open, and in the second my attention turned to him, Julia sprang for the door. She blew past me, knocked Bobby sprawling and flung herself to the ground.

  “Shit!” I spat, moving after her. She was hauling ass at top vamp- speed, sprinting across my lawn and up the steps to the porch. She grabbed hold of the door handle and yanked, but the door was solid steel with bank vault-style rods set into a reinforced frame. At least Bobby closed the door behind him when he came back to the ambulance. No baby vamp was getting that door open without the lock code.

  Which she remembered, because she’d heard me tell Bobby. Double shit.

  Fortunately, she didn’t have time to get more than the first two digits input before I grabbed her shoulder and spun her around. I slammed her back against the door and put a hand around her throat. “Don’t move, or I’ll rip your head off,” I growled in her face, then pressed a thumb to the touchpad by the door. “Omega lockdown,” I said, and heard the thunk of additional deadbolts slam into place on the other side of the door. Now only a select few people could open the door, and only with a biometric and verbal code.

  My home secure, I turned my attention back to Julia. “I wasn’t done talking to you,” I said.

  “I was done listening,” she said, raising a knee into my groin. I was ready for that, having sparred with Sabrina a lot. A nut shot is the right move for most smaller opponents, but I twisted and she just hit me in the thigh. What she did accomplish was distracting me enough to loosen my grip just a hair, and that gave her the inch she needed.

  Julia slammed both arms into my wrist, breaking my grip on her throat, then she ducked under my arm and ran for the ambulance. Bobby was back on his feet by now, struggling to climb into the back of the vehicle away from the crazy vampires. He wasn’t fast enough, and Julia had him before I could get close.

  She stood behind Bobby with his head bent over to one side, exposing his carotid artery thumping with fresh blood. “Take another step and I’ll drink him dry,” she slurred around her new fangs. A little blood trickled down her lips from where the fangs poked through her gums for the first time, and it made her look like a demented Halloween costume. Except we were three months late for Halloween, and she wasn’t playing dress-up.

  “Let him go,” I said, holding up both hands. “I don’t want to hurt you, Julia. If I wanted to do that, you never would have woken up. I’d just have shoved a stake through your heart in the ambulance and called it a night.”

  “You’re full of shit,” she said. “You talk a big game, but I bet you don’t even have a stake with you. Much less one that can hurt me now. Nobody’s ever going to hurt me again, you son of a bitch. I don’t have to listen to you, to Mom, to those assholes at school—nobody. I’m done working my ass off at school then slinging diner food all night just to go to college and do it all for another four years. Who cares about that now? I’m a goddess! Worship me, worm!” She gave Bobby a shake. “Worship me!”

  Well, shit. I guess she was batshit crazy after all. “Let him go,” I said. This time I put my will into it and pushed her.

  “Kiss my ass.”

  It didn’t work. My compulsion slid off her like water off a duck’s back, and I’m sure I had a stupid expression on my face, because she laughed like I was the funniest thing since Eddie Murphy Raw. “What the hell?”

  “Oh, am I supposed to do what you want just because you’re older? Well, screw you, Master. I don’t kneel to anybody. Unless I’m getting down with my dinner, and I think I want to know what my new meal plan tastes like.” She dropped to one knee and pressed her mouth to Bobby’s throat.

  I didn’t hesitate. I couldn’t. There was no world in which I let her drink from one of my most trusted helpers. Bobby and I weren’t friends, exactly, but he was somebody I could count on when shit went sideways, and I needed him to know that he could count on me, too. So the second Julia’s eyes were off me, I drew the Glock from my hip and put two 9mm rounds in the top of her head, destroying her brain and snuffing out her new unlife before she even nicked the flesh on Bobby’s throat.

  She collapsed, blood, skull fragments, and brain matter splattering all over my lawn and Bobby’s shirt, and the big man scrambled away from her on his hands and knees. He fell, then rolled over and scooted backward on his butt, panting in fear and frantically wiping pieces of Julia off his shoulder.

  I walked over to her, rolled her over, and put four rounds into her chest, the hollowpoint bullets pulping her heart and ending any chance of her healing from those devastating injuries. No amount of blood, no matter the source, could heal that kind of damage. I holstered my gun and looked over at Bobby. “You okay?”

  “Yeah, just great. Remind me never to do another pickup when Law says th
e victim is exsanguinated.”

  “You don’t have the best track record with those, it’s true. What are you now, two for two?”

  “Abby and this bitch,” he concurred.

  “She was just a kid, Bobby.”

  “She was a psycho that tried to kill me!”

  “And still just a kid. It shouldn’t have come to this. I screwed up, man. I blew it.” I turned and started toward the house. “If you need a drink, I’ll leave the door open for you and you can come in after you notify Sabrina so she can take care of the coroner.”

  “What are you going to do about this mess?” he called to my back.

  “I’m going to get drunk. Drunk-ish, anyway. Sunrise is in two hours. She’ll be ash ten minutes after that. As long as the yard doesn’t catch fire, it’ll make a better cleanup than I ever could.” I was on the porch by now, my thumb pressed to the keypad. “Unlock Alpha.” My voiceprint recognized, the security system unlocked the door and I stepped into my house.

  A couple of minutes later, Bobby walked in to find me sitting on the bottom of the stairs staring at the door. “That offer of a drink still open?”

  “Yeah,” I said, standing up. I walked over to the other set of stairs and led Bobby down to the war room. I grabbed him a Miller Lite from the baby fridge and grabbed a bottle of vodka for myself.

  “Power drinking?” he asked.

  “Takes a lot to knock the edge off,” I replied. “And tonight had a lot of edges.”

  “You ain’t bullshitting,” he said, raising his beer bottle to me.

  He was on his third beer when Greg walked in forty-five minutes later. I was finished with the vodka and halfway through a handle of Captain Morgan. “What the hell is this?” my partner asked as he clumped down the stairs. “It looks like a horror movie set on our lawn, and you two are getting drunk in the den? And what the hell is all over you, Bobby? You know we’re going to have to replace that couch now, right?”

  “I killed her, Greg.”

  He drew up short. “What?”

  “I screwed up. Every step of the way, I blew it. She woke up before I staked, and she was . . . she was okay, man. At least I thought she was. She was coherent, not rambling, nothing. I thought . . . I don’t know what I thought. I thought that maybe I didn’t have to kill a damn kid. I wanted to not have to kill a damn kid. I wanted it so bad I didn’t see it. The rush was too much for her. She tried to kill Bobby, wouldn’t listen to my compulsions, and I shot her in the head. A lot. Then I shot her in the chest. A lot. I couldn’t get through to her, and she almost killed Bobby because of it.”

  “It’s cool, man,” Bobby said. “You took care of it. No harm, no—”

  “If you say no harm, no foul, I’ll drain you myself,” I snarled at him. “I fucked up, Bob. I fucked up, and you almost died because of it. And Julia did die. So I’m going to get shitfaced drunk and regret everything for a couple hours, then I’ll probably puke, cry, and drink some more.”

  Greg grabbed a bottle of Johnnie Walker Red from the bar and came to sit next to me. “Then we’ll get up in the morning and chase down the son of a bitch that did this.”

  I clinked bottles with my best friend and set about getting seriously hammered.

  Chapter 11

  “JESUS WEPT, WHAT happened in here?” Sabrina’s voice woke me at an ungodly hour, and I crashed to the floor when I rolled over in bed. That’s when I realized I wasn’t in bed. I patted the floor by my face. Hardwood, or the fake hardwood that we put down in the war room because it’s way easier to get blood out of than the real stuff.

  “Bobby, what are you doing here?” Sabrina asked, and the evening all came rushing back to me. I pushed myself up to my hands and knees, gave my head a vigorous shake, and levered myself up onto the couch. Bobby was sprawled on the couch opposite me, and Greg was in his gamer chair a dozen feet away, slowly stirring to life, his gaming headset and VR glasses askew on his face.

  Bobby groaned and rolled over, conducting the same gravity experiment I had and with the same level of success. His big body crashed to the floor a lot more solidly than I did, and a half-empty Miller Lite bottle on the end table rocked back and forth before tumbling over to spill the dregs of room-temperature domestic-beer foulness all down Bobby’s neck and back.

  “Shit,” he said from the floor. “That’s cold, man.”

  “I repeat, what the hell happened in here?” Sabrina asked, perching on the arm of the couch Bobby just fell from and fixing me with a stare that could only be described as baleful. And judge-y. And condemning. Okay, so maybe there were a lot of ways to describe it. But it was a scary- ass look.

  “I had to kill her, Sabrina,” I said, dragging myself up to the sofa behind me and surveying the wreckage of the night before. Eight or nine beer bottles littered the coffee table between the couches, and I figured that was Bobby’s contribution to the festivities. My damage took the form of two bottles of Ciroc, a handle of Captain Morgan, and what looked like my best efforts to just drink up anything in the liquor cabinet that had already been opened. Vodka, rum, tequila. Good thing I was already dead, because the sight of that devastating mix of boozes was enough to kill a human.

  “I’m sorry, baby. I know that must have been awful.” She came over to my couch and sat next to me, putting her arm around my shoulders.

  “I’m guessing your night was no better,” I said. I kept my gaze fixed on the empty bottles on the table, doing my best not to lose my shit again.

  “Yeah, it was pretty awful. Notifications are the worst part of my job, and this one . . . well, let’s just say that the CMPD didn’t earn itself any fans with this case. Now did you drink everything in the house, or is there still enough left for me to knock the edge off a little before I try to crash for a few hours?”

  “Here,” came a new voice from the back of the room. Abby walked into the room like a backlit angel carrying a case of booze. “I cleaned out the wet bar in your office, Jimmy. We weren’t sure how long you were going to wallow, so we figured we’d better be prepared.” The “we” included William, my executive assistant and the single most together person I’d ever met. I raised an eyebrow at him as he followed Abby in carrying two more cases of assorted booze.

  He set the liquor down on the conference table, pulled out a bottle, and walked over to Sabrina. “I will wash a glass for you, Detective Law. The boys and Mr. Reed devastated our clean glassware last night, so it may take a moment.”

  “Don’t sweat it, William,” Sabrina said. She peeled the foil off the neck of the bottle, unscrewed the cap, and took a long draught. She made a face and sat back down next to me. “I hate Scotch.”

  “Yeah, me too,” I said.

  “Me three,” Greg called from his chair.

  “Then why do you keep it around?” Abby asked. “If none of us like it—”

  “Mike loved Scotch,” I said, and her mouth snapped shut with an audible click. “I kept it around for Mike, and since he died, nobody really drinks it. But I keep a bottle, and when we run out of everything else—”

  “Which we did,” Greg chimed in, struggling to his feet and staggering to the minifridge.

  “Then we drink the Scotch,” I finished.

  “Yeah, that sounds healthy,” Abby said.

  “Binge drinking is not a sign of excellent mental health, Abs,” I said. “So drinking a bottle of booze I hate but keep around in memory of my dead best friend is the least of my worries when I’m pounding alcohol at a good enough clip to get blackout drunk, even with a vampire’s metabolism.”

  “Not to mention the living embodiment of a city working to heal you as fast as you can damage yourself,” William added.

  “Yeah, that was awkward,” I said. “The Soul of the City really didn’t want me getting sloppy drunk last night.”

  “But we persevered,�
� Greg said, holding up bags of blood in each hand. “A or B?”

  “A, please,” I said. He tossed me the bag in his left hand, and I drained it in one long slurp. “That’s a little better.” I walked back over to sit next to Sabrina, tossing the empty bag on the coffee table amidst all the other wreckage. “You okay over there, Bobby?”

  “No,” he said. “Do not ever try to drink with vampires. They will wreck your shit.”

  “Most humans should just avoid us in general,” I said. “Don’t you have to get the ambulance back?”

  His head popped up like a groundhog. “Sonofagun! I’m gonna be so fired.”

  “Here,” Sabrina said after another long pull of Scotch. “Give them my card. Tell them you were with me if they give you any problems. They can contact Lieutenant McDaniel if they need any information.”

  “I’m still way too drunk to drive,” Bobby said. He looked around the room. “And none of you can go out in the daylight.”

  “Well, I can, but I just slammed about six shots in ten minutes, so I shouldn’t get behind the wheel, either,” Sabrina said.

  “Come here, Bobby,” I said, pulling out my pocketknife. “This is gonna be kinda gross, but you’ll sober up in seconds.” I sliced the ball of my thumb and held it up. “Drink.”

  “What? Whoa, no, man! I don’t want to be a vampire!” He held up both hands and backed up. “I’m feeling a lot more sober, really!”

  “You won’t turn unless I drain you first. And I’m not going to drain you. Just drink from me. It’ll heal you and burn out the alcohol. You won’t even have a hangover.” Bobby gave me a dubious look, but he put his mouth to the cut in my thumb and sucked. A couple of seconds later, he stood up, clear-eyed and shaking a little as the poisons purged themselves from his body almost instantly.