All Knight Long

by John G. Hartness

  “Yeah, that’s not good,” I agreed. “But he quit? He was a Master and he just . . . quit?”

  “He did,” William said, and the look that went across his face said that he remembered this story a lot better than someone who just read about it in a history book. “It was not simple, but Master Jefferson was the most brilliant man I ever knew, alive or dead, and he established a succession plan that allowed him to retire to Monticello after his Presidency and pass the reins of power off to another.”

  “Huh,” I said, leaning back. “Well, that’s certainly something to think about, isn’t it?”

  Then Sabrina’s phone rang, and everything went sideways. Again.

  Chapter 20

  SABRINA ANSWERED the phone, nodded a couple of times, then her face went very still. “Repeat that name, Lieutenant. Okay, got it. Have you notified the next of kin? Good. I’ll be there in a few. If the family is notified, please make sure they are kept away from the body until I give the word. . . . Yes sir, that’s his last name. . . . Yes, sir, I’m pretty sure that’s exactly where we are. . . . I’ll try, sir, but this could be bad.”

  She hung up the phone and looked up at me. I knew that look. I knew it because it was the look I’d had when I walked out of Mike’s room at the church for the last time. It was the look I’d seen on Greg’s face when Detective Nester was killed fighting Lilith beside us. My stomach knotted up as my mind raced, running down the mental checklist of people I gave a shit about, the vast majority of whom were in the house with me.

  “Who?” I asked. The only people I could think about that would affect her like that were family, but none of them were local, then my mind shot to my parents, still living in Ballantyne in an overpriced condo, gently drifting toward delayed retirement.

  “Jimmy, I need you to stay calm.” I recognized that voice. It was the voice she used with violent offenders to talk them into not doing anything brutally stupid and getting anyone killed.

  The more she talked, the less interested I was in remaining calm. Adrenaline and my super-charged healing burned the last of the alcohol from my system, and I was stone sober. “Who?” It was less of a question this time, and more of a demand.

  She took a deep breath, and her eyes flicked over to William.

  “Don’t look at him, Sabrina. I don’t need to be handled. I need the truth. Who did they find? Was it another victim of the same vamp?”

  She answered the easier question first, a standard tactic in calming a crazy person. “The victim has all the same characteristics as the other two women, she’s just a little older than the others.”

  I took a deep breath, forcing myself to at least give an outward appearance of calm. “Okay, so who is it?” I wracked my brain, trying to come up with any young women that I was close to. “Seriously, Sabrina. Abby is the only woman under thirty I even know anymore, much less give a shit about. And she’s already dead. So who is the dead girl, and why are you so shit-scared that I’m going to flip out over it?”

  She locked eyes with me, and the sadness I saw there was heartbreaking. My tough-as-nails girlfriend was going to say something that would hurt me deeply, and it was killing her. “It’s not you I’m worried about, baby. It’s Greg.”

  All the pieces fell into place with a crushing mental click. “No.”

  Sabrina saw me get it. “Yes, Jimmy.”

  “She’s just a kid. It can’t be her. I mean, it could, but that would be way outside this guy’s hunting range.”

  “Jimmy, she’s twenty-eight. And looks younger. Lieutenant McDaniel made the ID himself from her driver’s license. He was at the morgue with Bobby. Bobby agreed with the lieutenant.”

  My mind reeled back to the last time I laid eyes on her. Emily Knightwood was a senior in college when I last saw her, the first time we met the vampire known as The Professor, the former owner of the house I now lived in. “Oh shit.”

  “I hate to interrupt this very fraught moment, but should I wake Greg for this?” William asked, rising from his seat.

  “No!” I sprang up and shoved him back to the couch. I froze, looking at my hand. “Sorry. No. Ummm . . . I’m going to have to do this. It’s not going to be good. Get some extra blood ready. I might need it.” I looked at the unconscious Fitzpatrick. “Wake him up, heal him up, and get him showered. Can you . . . ?” I asked William.

  “Certainly, sir.” He still had no idea what was going on, but he took off his suit coat, rolled up a sleeve, and started the less-than-appealing process of getting Sean up, awake, and feeding him a couple drops of vampire blood to flush the alcohol from his system.

  I started for the stairs.

  “Do you want me to go with you?” Sabrina asked.

  “No,” I said. “This one I’ve gotta do. But thanks. Just . . . call Bobby, tell him what’s coming, and tell him to restrain her, but under no circumstances is he to harm her. We’ll handle . . . things when we get there.”

  “Jimmy, are you going to . . . ?”

  “God, I hope not.” I continued up the stairs, mentally steeling myself for the conversation ahead. Two floors up, I knocked on Greg’s door, then pushed it open. He sat up instantly, even before I stepped over the tripwire he had rigged to the doorframe.

  “What is it?” he asked, no sign of sleep in his voice.

  “Were you awake?”

  “I sensed a disturbance in the Force,” he quoted. He was one hundred percent serious, too. Greg had always been a little sensitive, or psychic, or whatever people call it nowadays.

  He looked up at me. “What’s wrong, bro? You looked like somebody just ran over your dog. And since we don’t have a dog, I know that’s not it. Is Sabrina okay? Abby?” Greg spun around and put his feet on the floor, but I put a hand on his shoulder before he could stand.

  “Greg . . . buddy . . . they found another victim.”

  “Okay. Well, I mean, that’s awful, but it gives another data point and more evidence. Aw shit, are you gonna have to kill another baby vampire? I know that tears you up, man. But you gotta—”

  “Shut up.” The sharpness of my tone surprised us both, and shocked Greg right into silence. “Greg, this new victim. It’s Emily.”

  He wrinkled his brow, then shook his head a little, as if to clear away the last sleep-cobwebs. “What? Emily who? Wait, no, that can’t be right. They must have ID’d her wrong. Emily, I mean, my Emily’s way too old for this guy’s victimology. This must be—”

  “It’s not,” I said, trying to hold his gaze, but his eyes flicked up, down, and around as he worked to process the news. “Greg, she still had her wallet on her. The new victim is Emily. It’s your sister. I’m so sorry, buddy. I’m so, so sorry.”

  “No. You’re wrong. They’re wrong. Emily can’t be dead. She’s pushing thirty now. This asshole hasn’t hurt anybody over twenty-one. She’s too old for his target.”

  “We don’t have a complete picture of his victim list. For all we know there are half a dozen mid-twenties vampires running around Charlotte with his tooth prints in their necks. This isn’t a mistake, buddy. It’s Emily. Now get dressed. We have to get to the morgue and deal with her when she wakes up.”

  He stood up, anger becoming evident in his jerky movements. He walked over to the dresser, stripped off his Wookiee pajamas, tossed them in the hamper, and pulled out a clean Rocket Raccoon T-shirt and grabbed a pair of jeans from the floor. He turned to me, scowling in his C-3P0 boxers, and said, “Whoever found the wallet just ID’d the body wrong. It was just a mistake. I’ll go look at the body, but for evidence, not because it’s Emily. Besides, you have a shitty track record with leaving me anything to examine on this case. Yeah, that’s it. The uniform that called it in just screwed up the ID. I’ll get down there and sort all this—”

  “McDaniel called Sabrina personally. He verified the identity before he called.
He saw her, Greg. It’s Emily. She’s been turned. Now we’re going to have to get to her before she wakes up alone, and scared, and—”

  “Hungry. She’s going to wake up hungry.” I saw him remember that feeling. The ravenous hunger that no mortal food could satisfy.

  “Yeah.”

  He looked back at me then, standing there with his jeans in his hand, wearing a silly shirt and even sillier underpants, and one tear rolled down his cheek. “Can you give me just a minute? I’ll be down in a second, but I . . . I’m gonna need a minute.”

  He didn’t look like he was on the verge of tearing anything completely apart, so I nodded. “Yeah, no problem. I need to go change before we go, too.”

  “And take a shower,” he said. “You smell like shit.”

  “Okay,” I said, opening the door and stepping out into the hall. To run almost face-first into Abby. “When did you get home?” I asked.

  “About two minutes ago.”

  “How much did you hear?”

  “Enough. And Sabrina’s text filled in most of it before I got here. What do you need me to do?”

  “Watch this door,” I said. “He’s right. I can’t go downtown smelling like a sewer and a liquor store. Let me get cleaned up while Greg pulls himself together. You keep him from getting any bright ideas about leaving without me.”

  “Will do.” She leaned against the wall opposite Greg’s door and folded her arms as I walked down the hall to my room.

  THIRTY MINUTES later Greg and I walked into the morgue, unwrapping scarves from our faces. Sabrina got us there driving her car, with me and my flammable partner under tarps in the backseat. Sean stopped at the desk outside the morgue to deal with paperwork, but we barged right through.

  “Where is she, Bobby?” Greg asked, his voice tight.

  Bobby pointed to a metal table in the center of the room. A slight form lay on it, covered by a white sheet. “I haven’t touched her, Greg. I swear. I just cuffed her to the table and covered her up.”

  Greg stopped a few feet from the table, not speaking. Bobby made a wide pass around us both on his way out the door. After several seconds, I stepped up to my best friend’s side and put my hand on his shoulder.

  “I can’t do it. I can’t pull that sheet back.” His voice was shaking, and I could feel him under my hand, almost vibrating.

  “Do you want me to do it?”

  “No. Just . . . give me a second, okay?”

  I didn’t reply, just stepped back and gave him a little more space. My mind was whirring, a cacophony of thoughts tumbling around in my head. Did the killer know who Emily was? Did he know Greg was my best friend? Was this a shot at me? Was this my fault? Or was it just a coincidence? Could it be a coincidence?

  Greg stepped forward and pulled the sheet down a little. I looked over his shoulder as her face came into view. Emily was older than the last time I’d seen her, which made sense, since a couple years had passed. Her hair was shorter and streaked with pink and teal. She was pale, and the slash on her neck was neat, precise. It didn’t look right for a vampire kill, it was too straight, too perfect. This didn’t look like a bite, not even the relatively clean ones we tended to leave. This looked like a scalpel. Had she been drained just to kill her? Was she not going to turn at all, making this not a vampire kill, but a copycat?

  Then her eyes opened, and she tried to sit up. Nope, definitely vampire.

  Chapter 21

  IN MY EXPERIENCE, there are two ways that newborn vampires wake up: hungry, or hungry and crazy. It’s been a long time since I woke up dead in my crappy little apartment in South Carolina, with my pants around my ankles and my roommate leaning over me, but as far as I recall, I woke up hungry. The first thing I did when I woke up was bite Greg right on his carotid artery, rip through the flesh of his neck, and drain him dry.

  The second thing I did was pull up my pants, because when my dead roomie fell on my naked lap, it was a little awkward. Then I started to freak out, because I was covered in blood and Greg, and me sitting half-naked on my sofa, and I was pretty sure I was a vampire.

  Then I puked. A lot. Like, everything I’d eaten for several days. Suffice to say I felt like I’d turned myself inside out when I was done. Then I had a dead best friend to deal with, so that was a whole new level of freaking out. The only thing I didn’t do was run screaming out into the morning light, which—while a pretty natural reaction—would have been bad. I’ve always thought that was why there aren’t more vampires. I expect a lot of people wake up dead, freak out, and run out of their house. For about thirty seconds.

  Oddly enough, the blood I drank from Greg didn’t come back up. I’ve always just assumed that it was magically absorbed into my bloodstream or something. I try not to think too much about the details of my vampirism. I just accept that it’s magic and move along, until I have to explain the realities of their new life to a fledgling again.

  Fledglings like Emily. And that brings me right back to the present, to standing in the Charlotte morgue with a starved twenty-something handcuffed to an autopsy table screaming about her wrists burning. Which they were. The silver-plated handcuffs Bobby used were scorching the crap out of her, but the way she was thrashing around, I wasn’t interested in unlocking her any time soon. Instead, I stepped over to the pull-out drawer where Bobby stores blood and yanked it open. He keeps a half-dozen pints or so on ice in a top drawer, because he knows his boss will never look there. The man is barely five-six and would need a stepladder to see inside. Bobby and I are both almost a foot taller than the Chief Medical Examiner, so we have no problem reaching the stash.

  I fished out three pint bags and tossed one to Greg. “Give her this.”

  “Why do I have to give it to her?” he asked, looking at the girl straining against the cuffs. Her eyes were completely black, a sure sign that she was both hungry and really pissed off.

  “She’s your sister, dude, not mine.”

  “Ass,” Greg said, but he stepped up to where Emily thrashed against her bonds and sliced open the top of the blood bag with his pocketknife. As the smell of blood filled the air, the girl went statue-still, her eyes locked on Greg’s hand. “You want some?” he asked. “It smells good, right? Well, calm down, behave, and you can have this and more.”

  He held the bag up to her mouth, and she slurped down the contents, greed and hunger making her sloppy. It was also probably the first time she’d ever drank blood from a bag, which is not the easiest thing in the world to do. She sucked the sides flat on the blood bag like a frat boy with a keg, and I pitched Greg another bag. Emily drained that one in seconds as well, and when she came up for air, the black in her eyes had receded, and she was looking a lot more like a young woman, and a lot less like a ravening monster.

  “G-Greg? Is that you?” I could see the confusion in her face from across the room as she recognized her brother. The brother she’d thought was dead for most of her life. The only real memories she would have him were from early childhood, and now here he stood, right in front of her, looking just like he did in the old family photos. Well, slightly better than the ones from when we were in middle school, but not much.

  “It’s me, Emmy,” he said, using the baby name he used to call her when she was a toddler.

  “Am I . . . am I dead?”

  She had no idea exactly how tough that one was going to be to answer. But we got a reprieve, because that’s when I saw her body convulse. “Dude, she’s gonna blow!” I shouted, running to her side with a trash can. She turned to me and stuck her face in the plastic container, cutting loose with a stream of vomit that would make Linda Blair blush.

  Greg hustled around the table to hold her hair back, but it wasn’t really long enough to get in the way, so he settled on patting her back and murmuring soothing nonsense while she emptied her stomach. I passed off trashcan duty and walked to
the minifridge by Bobby’s desk. I looked inside, then closed the door quickly and moved to the one next to it. From the non-evidence fridge, I grabbed a diet soda and carried it back over to the table.

  “Can we unfasten the cuffs?” Greg asked.

  “Not until we decide if she’s gonna settle into this or not,” I said. I didn’t want to mention to Greg that there was still a better than fifty-fifty shot that I was going to have to kill his sister, but the look in his eyes at my answer said that he knew the score. It also said that the beating he gave me over letting our best friend Mike die was nothing to what he would do to me if I tried to hurt Emily.

  I really didn’t want it to come to that. I didn’t want to kill my third fledgling vampire in as many days, but I wasn’t going to let a crazed rogue tear through my city like a toddler with superpowers, either.

  But for now, she was handcuffed to an autopsy table and not able to hurt anyone, including herself (as long as we aren’t counting the burns on her wrists), so we could talk to her a little. I looked at the sweating and very confused Emily and held out the soda.

  “Diet Coke? Sorry it’s not the real thing, but it’s all they keep in the fridge around here.”

  She nodded, then tried to reach for the can. Her wrist rattled against the cuffs, and she winced as it burned a new spot on her skin.

  “Sorry about that,” I said. “But the cuffs stay on until we decide you’re not psychotic.”

  “Psychotic? Look, asshole, I’m not the one kidnapping women and handcuffing them to tables, then pretending to be their dead brother. If anybody’s the psycho, it’s you two sons of bitches, and when I get loose, I’m going to—”

  “Do you want the Coke or not?” My tone stopped her cold, and she looked at me with wide eyes. “Good. Now that you’ve shut your trap, let’s keep it that way for a minute or two. Do you want a drink? I’m not letting you loose, so if you want to wash the taste of puke and blood out of your mouth, I’ll hold it for you.”