The Black Knight Chronicles (Book 6): Man in Black

by John G. Hartness

  A mouth that also had a prehensile five-foot tongue in it, or partially in it. The exposed part was wrapped around a small dude in all black who I assumed had been a stagehand before his recent promotion to entrée. The demon was dangling him high in the air by a foot and lowering his squirming body down toward that nasty mouth. I could see scraps of fabric from meals gone by wedged between the monster’s teeth, and I shuddered a little.

  I stepped out onto the stage and put four rounds of cold iron 9mm into the demon’s back. It felt the impact, even if only as a distraction, because it stopped lowering the thrashing stagehand into its gaping maw and turned to me. The demon folded its head down to look at me, and I holstered my pistol.

  “You know, pal, immortality is just going to be one long pudding cup if you don’t learn to floss.”

  The demon stared at me for a second, then opened its mouth as if to swallow the technician whole. I threw a silver-edged dagger, which bounced off the monster’s snout without so much as a paper cut. The whack did get the thing’s attention again, and this time it threw the tech off into the wings and focused its attention on me.

  “You know, because all those teeth are going to fall out, and . . . oh, screw it, obviously dental hygiene jokes are lost on the denizens of Hell. So let’s dance, ugly.”

  I now had the full attention of a pissed-off and hungry demon, not to mention the couple dozen idiot audience members who were convinced this was just part of the show and stayed in their seats. Problem was, I hadn’t really thought this fight through past the “keep the building’s tech staff from getting eaten” part.

  The demon charged, and I jumped straight up. I grabbed a lighting bar almost twenty feet up and swung myself up onto the rigging pipe. I looked down and saw the demon turning in circles, looking for me. It whipped its head back and forth, its attention unfortunately not landing on Paulson standing far out of the way in the wings, and headed for the audience. I drew Excalibur and dropped from the rafters to land on the demon’s shoulders and plunge my magical sword into its head, killing it in one swift motion.

  At least that was the original idea. Except I am not a well-coordinated superhero. Instead, I landed on the stage floor eight feet behind the monster and twisted my ankle in the process. I fell to the floor like a gangly heap of uncooked spaghetti, spewing profanity at a heretofore unknown rate. But I didn’t drop my sword, so point for me. The demon heard the clatter of me crashing to the floor and turned, all four arms waving in my general direction. Close up, the thing was even uglier than from twenty feet in the air. Pale green saliva and blood dripped from its chin, leaving drops of foul-smelling ichor all over the stage.

  “Damn,” I said. “I’ve seen some nasty shit before, but you are absolutely the ugliest mother I’ve ever laid eyes on, and I went toe-to-toe with Belial a couple years ago.”

  It cocked its head to the side, and the crimson skin seemed to shimmer and buckle. A second later, a beautiful red-haired girl with curves in all the right places stood naked in front of me. The only hint of supernatural about her was a tail and the jet-black eyes with no iris, just a deep expanse of ebony pupil staring back at me.

  “Is this better, human? Does this form appeal to you?” It/she smiled at me and held out a hand.

  I drew Excalibur and took one step back. “I don’t know, lady. Does the offer of three feet of steel appeal to you?”

  “I see,” the demon said. “Would you prefer I look like this?” It changed, and Greg stood in front of me, a Lightsaber in his hand. “Or this?” Sabrina was suddenly there, service weapon leveled at me. “Or maybe this?” It became Mike, holding a glowing cross.

  That last one pissed me off. A lot. It’s one thing for monsters to look like generic people, but when one goes poking around in my head for people to imitate, that’s a bridge too damn far. I raised Excalibur and charged, slicing the demon’s hand off at the wrist. The cross clattered to the floor and turned to black sludge, and the demon snapped back to its uglier, eight-foot-tall badass creature of nightmares version. It reared up and hissed at me, exposing all those teeth and lashing out at me with tail and tongue simultaneously. Even with only three arms, it had more weapons than I could deal with at one time. So I took a whack at its tongue with my sword and dropped straight down to avoid all the other strikes.

  I caught it a glancing blow on the rubbery tentacle-like tongue, but that was enough to send it scrambling backward, shrieking and waving its tail and arms in a fury.

  “Hurts, doesn’t it?” I taunted. I don’t care how mean or tough a monster is, if you cut its tongue with a magical sword, you’re gonna get its attention.

  The demon charged me, head lowered and arms wide. It obviously wanted to pin me to a wall and suck the everything out of me with its tongue and tail. I went high this time, leaping over the demon and ready for that six-foot tail—I knew it was coming. Instead of getting skewered by the spike, I dodged and wrapped my arms around the tail, riding it down to the ground. I landed, planted both feet, and pulled on the tail like my life depended on it. Which it did. I expected to yank the demon off its feet and swing it into a wall or two on the way to shoving Excalibur into as many unpleasant places as I could find.

  I did not expect the demon’s tail to pull off like a damned lizard, leaving me staggering back holding a six-foot spiked tail, and sending the demon face-first off the front edge of the stage into the orchestra pit.

  “Son of a bitch,” I muttered, running to the edge of the stage and looking down. The orchestra had long since abandoned the theatre, there being nothing in their contracts about fighting demons. So the demon was lying in the middle of a tangle of music stands, electrical cords, and an abandoned drum kit. It thrashed around, fighting to disentangle itself from the instruments and equipment.

  This is going to go down as one of my better ideas, I’m sure. I jumped in after it.

  Chapter 13

  I LANDED ON THE conductor’s box and lashed out with my sword. The demon ducked but instinctively threw up an arm to block. That’s a terrible idea when you’re facing a superhumanly strong opponent with a magical sword, just for the record. Another clawed arm went sailing, and I began to feel a fair fight coming on. I’d cut him down to the right number of arms, and his tail was gone, so maybe I could get this thing banished or killed before its tongue healed and I had to tell him that I just wasn’t the kind of girl who tongue-kissed on the first date. And never with a tongue longer than my leg.

  The demon shook himself free of the kick drum and flung a snare at my head. I batted the drum out of the air and jumped back up onto the stage. The demon did exactly what I wanted it to do, which was follow me somewhere that I had more room to fight. Unfortunately it also did exactly what I didn’t want, which was switch forms into a muscular human about seven feet tall with fists the size of my face. It landed on the stage like the pissed-off love child of Chewbacca and Lebron James, and ran straight at me.

  I juked left, then right, then ducked under the outstretched arm of the demon and lashed out with my sword out to hamstring the giant. It went down, but turned what should have been a graceless sprawl into a forward roll, then came up on one foot, spun around at a ridiculous speed, and flew at me in a face-first dive of scary-deadly teeth, all pointed in my direction. I jumped straight up and flipped forward in midair, scoring the monster’s back with my sword. It howled and belly-flopped onto the stage three feet past where I’d stood mere seconds earlier, and I landed crouched on my feet with one hand down for balance. I whirled on the demon, which was already charging me again. This time I couldn’t get completely out of the way, and it clipped me on the hip with a shoulder. I crashed to the stage again, holding on to my sword by my fingertips and sheer stubbornness, and rolled away from the diving demon, which had already reversed course and sprung back to where I lay on the wooden floor.

  I managed not to be there when the beastie landed, and I struggled to my feet about five yards away from where it pounced. The demon hopped
up, fresh as a daisy, and shifted forms again into its four-armed, red-skinned, horned shape. It had even regrown its tail, which I thought was a little unfair, but it did look much shorter and thinner, and the new spare arms didn’t have claws at the ends, just fingers.

  “You’re starting to look a little the worse for wear, pal,” I quipped. “Maybe you should just go back to Hell and give up on North Carolina. I hear the guy that looks out for that part of the world is tougher than he looks.”

  “Then I will gain all the more glory in the ranks of Hell for bringing his head back to lay at the feet of my masters!” Someone tell me why I always get the ambitious demon, not the lazy, just-here-for-the-eating-souls demon. He charged again. I dodged to the side again. I tried to cut his leg off with Excalibur again, but this time he was ready for my reindeer games. Instead of losing balance when I dodged, he pulled up abruptly, cut off his charge, and lashed out with both his left arms. I ducked the upper one, but doing so put my face right in line with his lower elbow, which tagged me square on the jaw.

  I went down to one knee, and he spun onto me, raining punches and slashes down with all four arms and one knee. Every so often, the tail would dart in for a jab, but he hadn’t regrown the spike yet, so it was just another punch. My leather duster held up against the worst of the remaining claws, and I tried to block as much as I could, but after getting three hard shots to the head, I had to try to cover up for a second and regroup. I put both forearms up to block the worst of the punches, and he yanked Excalibur from my grasp and flung it across the stage. I heard the sword clatter into the wings, and the pain of my injuries increased tenfold.

  My vision started to grey at the edges from the battering I was taking, and in desperation I yanked the Ruger LCP from my ankle holster and rolled onto my back. I pointed the pistol straight up and fired all six rounds right into the demon’s face. The bullets weren’t going to kill the demon, but half a dozen hammer blows to the face does not feel good, extra-planar powers or no. The demon reared back upright, and I skittered backward on my hands and butt away from its reach. I tossed my pistol aside and clambered to my feet as I waited for the demon to attack, but an attack never came. The monster just stood there, like it was frozen, then slowly toppled forward, collapsing to the stage face-first, with Excalibur’s hilt sticking out of the back of its neck. I stood there, gaping like a fish out of water for a second, then looked past the dead demon for my mystery savior, but there was no one there.

  I looked around the stage, then scanned the auditorium, but the only people or things left were me, the demon’s corpse, and the stagehand. Even the most diehard season ticket holders had bolted for the exit doors when I had started chopping off pieces of demon, and the stagehand was still out like a light. The only hint I had that anyone else had been there was a curtain twitching like someone had just run past it and the dead-but-not-killed-by-me demon at my feet. I pulled my sword from the creature’s back and decapitated it, just to be sure. The second Excalibur passed through the thing’s body, it turned to black sludge that burst into blue flame, and then vanished, leaving nothing but the outline of a four-armed giant body burned into the stage. This time there was no mistaking the ashen shadow that flew from the demon’s body and disappeared into the rafters. It was a banished sluagh, the same kind of evil spirit that I’d seen fleeing the snake-king’s body and the same thing that possessed Abby. The spirit that Lilith had placed inside Abby, to be real specific. Whatever was causing these attacks, they were definitely coming from the same source, and that source was looking more and more like Lilith. I filed that away for the future, because there was no way I could deal with Lilith while I still had Paulson on my tail. Then there was the little matter of a kidnapping to solve. Speaking of Paulson . . .

  I found him sitting in the third row, reading a playbill. I glared at Paulson for a moment then turned to try and find out anything I could about the demon. Might as well do something useful and sparring with Paulson didn’t exactly count.

  I walked over to the stagehand and shook him awake. He looked confused at first, but I could tell the moment he remembered by the look of sheer terror on his face. “The thing . . . where is it?”

  “It’s dead,” I said. “It won’t hurt you.”

  “You killed it?” He asked, looking at me. His expression telegraphed his difficulty reconciling my style and size with the badass required to put down his demon.

  “Yeah, I killed it,” I said, keeping the lie simple. No point in confusing him. “How did that thing get here, anyway?”

  “Faust summoned it.”

  “Not in the play, dude. In real life, how did that thing get here?”

  “For real, man, Faust summoned it!” He pointed upstage at a pile of rags on a platform, and for the first time I noticed a hand sticking out of the rags and remembered the report of the devoured actor.

  “Gross. So Faust summoned it, and it attacked Faust?”

  “Yeah, exactly. I don’t know how the hell he got his hands on a real spell, but he must have, right?”

  Right. They couldn’t have been summoning demons all through dress rehearsals, or I’m pretty sure I would have heard about it. “Was there anything different with tonight’s performance? I mean, specifically, the summoning?” I asked.

  The guy’s brow knit for a moment, then his eyes went wide. “Yeah! There was something. Lily, our dramaturge, brought in this new set of lines for the ritual, said they would sound more authentic. I guess they were more authentic than she knew, huh?”

  “Yeah, looks that way . . . hey, your . . . what’d you call her?”

  “Dramaturge. She’s the person who does all the research about the play, makes sure you understand the historical stuff in the world of the play, that kind of stuff.”

  “She’s the person who makes sure you’re casting the right spells,” I said.

  “Or at least saying lines that sound like spells,” he corrected me.

  “This Lily, is she hot, with long dark hair? Older than the rest of the students?”

  “We’ve got a lot of adults in classes here, man. But yeah, she was smokin’ and had long dark hair.”

  “I guess she left before the fun started?” I asked.

  “I dunno. Once everything went to hell—”

  “No pun intended,” I said.

  He looked startled, then a touch offended at my sense of humor, but went on. “Yeah, once the demon showed up, she was gone.”

  I bet she was. And I’ve got a pretty good idea where to find her. I pulled out my phone and dialed William. “Gonna need another set of cleaners at the Halton Theater.”

  “Are you all right, sir?”

  “I’m still kicking, if that’s the question. And thanks for asking.” I hung up and dialed another number.

  “McDaniel.” The smooth voice answered.

  “We’re good here,” I said. “But the college may have to have the floors refinished.” I looked down at the outline of a dead demon in the floor and chuckled a little.

  “Any idea what happened?” McDaniel asked.

  “Yeah, but it’s only a working theory. I’m not ready to talk about it yet.”

  “All right, then. If you’re up for more action, meet me at Owen’s place. We got a second ransom demand.”

  “And he wants me there?”

  “He wants either of us there about like he wants herpes, but I didn’t give him a choice. Meet me there in fifteen.” McDaniel clicked off, and I looked at Paulson, sitting in the plush seat in the third row just like he’d bought a ticket.

  “Enjoy the show?”

  “Absolutely,” he said. “I particularly enjoyed the part where you almost died. I thought that was a character choice you could have explored a little further, but it was serviceable work, for an amateur.”

  “I suppose you would have done things entirely differently,” I said, turning and walking off toward the loading dock, where I really hoped I hadn’t gotten a parking ticket. Campus police are vi
cious about their parking rules, even if you’re saving their students from angry beasts from the pits of Hell.

  Paulson walked up the side steps onto the stage and fell in behind me. “Actually, I would have done quite a few things differently, but the most important thing you missed was mind-wiping everyone in the audience.”

  I stopped so abruptly I almost fell over my own feet. “Why the icy blue hell are you on about this again? Mind-wiping the entire audience? The entire audience?”

  “One of the most important tasks of the Master is protecting the supernatural world in general, and the vampire community in particular, from discovery by the human populace. There were hundreds of people in that theatre tonight, all of whom saw the demon, and many of whom saw you fight the demon. All of them must have their memories of the event erased before word gets out.”

  “Paulson, I’m only going to ask this once, but it’s very important that you’re honest with me. Are you on drugs? Or are you just stupid?”

  The smaller vampire’s eyes went dark, and I could tell by the working of his jaw that he was trying not to throw down with me right there in the scene shop of the community college theatre building. He pushed past me out the door, onto the loading dock, and I followed.

  I grabbed his arm, and he spun around. “You want to take your hands off me, Black. Right. Now.”

  I let go, but I held his gaze. “You’ve never spent any time in America, have you? Before now, I mean.”

  “No,” he said between clenched teeth.

  “Then let me explain why I’m not going to mojo three hundred people, and then you can relax a little, and we can go on about our other mission for the night. Or we can just have our final showdown right now, and one of us goes home in a pizza box. Your call.”

  “Explain,” he growled.

  “Americans believe in three things—cheap, greasy food, large-breasted women, and the power of special effects. I guarantee that after the first two people say something about a monster at the opera, the next five will talk about the amazing demon costume they saw at the opera last night. They’re pretty sure the whole thing with demon eating the actor was done with special effects, and they didn’t stick around long enough to watch me cut its head off, so they aren’t going to believe for a minute that it was real.