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

by John G. Hartness

  “What exactly is a sluagh?” I asked, shaking off my dizziness and clambering to my feet.

  “Souls too evil for Hell, without even the slightest hope of redemption. They’ve been trapped in their own pocket dimension for millennia, just looking for someone to let them out so they might prey upon the living again.”

  “And now that someone is you,” I said.

  “Well, there’s a little more to it than that,” Lilith admitted. “I promised them Earth all to themselves.”

  “How exactly do you expect to honor that?” I asked. “There are seven billion people on this planet.”

  “Oh, I told the sluagh they could kill anyone they liked once they helped me with a little project.”

  “Like what little project?” The more she kept talking, the less attention she paid to the cops and my vampires turning her army into pieces of an army.

  “Taking over Heaven,” she said, then fired a bolt of red magic at my chest.

  I was so dumbfounded at her last words that I didn’t even try to move, just let the magical blast hit me square in the chest. I caught the full brunt of Lilith’s power, and even with the extra protections that came with being Master, the bolt knocked me flat on my back about fifteen feet away and left a smoking black mark in the center of my sternum. I lay there for a second, looking up at the night sky and thinking, Holy shit how did I get myself into this mess?

  Then two hands reached down for me at the same time. I took them, and Abby and Greg stood beside me, covered in gore, bleeding from a couple of scrapes they couldn’t avoid, but grinning at me.

  “Look who I found, boss,” Abby said.

  “You know I’m never gonna call you boss, right?” Greg said.

  “Yeah, and I know you’re never gonna stop wearing spandex and a utility belt to fights, either. Which one of those do you think offends me more?” I replied.

  “There’s a lot of those grey things coming out of that hole in the sky.” Abby said.

  “And they’re possessing our good guys and turning them against us,” Greg added.

  “The dead bad guys aren’t doing a very good job of staying dead, either,” Detective Nester looked out of place in his tactical gear, but I saw a hint of emerald on his right hand and saw he was wearing his Green Lantern ring over his gloves. I looked at his hand, then back to his eyes. He shrugged, and I just gave him a nerdy brotherhood head nod.

  I saw we were in the middle of a ring of tactical troops, all human, all scared shitless, but every one of them keeping it together enough to drop anything that came into their gunsights. Not everything they shot stayed dead, but these guys just shot it again and kept on working. McDaniel had found me the most badass bunch of humans I’d ever seen, and we were going to need everything they had to get through the night.

  “So we don’t have to fight just Lilith’s army, but the turned humans in the army we brought with us, too.” I turned my head to the newest voice, and Kyle King stood at my shoulder with a shotgun in hand.

  “Then we have to figure out how to close that portal,” Anna stepped through a magical hole in the air to stand next to Greg.

  “Good thing we brought a dragon,” Milandra said, as she and Tivernius landed behind us. “Although we barely got in before that portal opened up. Now there’s some kind of force field over the whole stadium. Nothing can get in or out until it goes away.”

  Well, that throws a wrench into my backup plans. Guess I’d better not get into too much trouble. Not that I think I could get into much more trouble if I tried.

  I looked around for a second. We were in the middle of a football field surrounded by literally hundreds of monsters who all wanted to kill us, driven by the millennia-old revenge fantasies of the most powerful witch in history. And I had three vampires, maybe thirty remaining human cops, one witch, a werewolf, a faerie queen, and a dragon on my side.

  I held out my fists to each side. Abby and Greg bumped fists with me, and we all turned to make one last charge at Lilith’s platform. I didn’t know what it would mean for the universe if Lilith used her army of nasties to take over Heaven, but I believed her when she said that the sluagh would destroy every human on the planet if left to their own devices. Yeah, not in my city.

  I turned to Lilith, nodded once, and shouted to my team, “Let’s hit it.”

  Chapter 31

  WE SPLIT UP immediately. Milandra and Tivernius took to the sky to provide air cover and harass the spell casters. Nester hopped on the roof of the assault vehicle with Trey and rolled forward, clearing my right flank. Abby and Greg shifted to my left, keeping the monsters from getting to me on that side, and I charged straight up the gut, Excalibur flashing and removing body parts with every step. Anna stayed back to blast anything that tried to sneak up on me, with Kyle back there to guard her while she threw fire or lightning or whatever.

  I covered the ground to Lilith in seconds, but she threw up a hand and raised a force bubble of some kind around herself. I crashed into it, but the second I thrust forward with Excalibur, it popped out of existence like its soapy brethren.

  “You and that goddamned sword,” Lilith snarled, jumping down to meet me. She waved her hand over her head, and a blade materialized there. It was a long sword, three feet of glistening black steel enveloped in purple fire that crackled as she swung the sword through the air.

  “You’re not the only one with a magical blade, Black. This is the Sword of Mars, the legendary blade wielded by Attila the Hun as he pillaged the Balkans, invaded Italy, and spilled European blood like a tidal wave. This is the blade that made him a king, and it is the blade that will take me to the gates of Heaven on a tsunami of fire, with your head hanging from my belt as a trophy.” She came at me, sword whirling, and I danced back, parrying with Excalibur and wincing as her sword slid down my blade to the crossguard, and the purple flame flickered across my skin.

  I drew back, and my wounds vanished in an instant as Excalibur’s healing magic went to work. I charged, beating Lilith back with my own strikes, only to miss a thrust and feel the fire across my ribs as she scored a long scratch along my chest. Slower to heal this time, I came back at her with a little more caution. I maneuvered around, trying to press her back against her stage, but she just leapt up and stepped onto the platform backward. I followed, but in the interests of not getting perforated on the way down, I took a swipe at her ankles first, then leapt over her to land on the other side of the platform.

  Lilith was faster than I expected, unfortunately, so when I landed, she was right there to plant a booted foot in my back and send me sprawling on the grass ten feet away. I rolled over just as she leapt at me, landing with her feet across my hips and her sword over my head. She slashed down, and I brought Excalibur up to block. Lilith leaned in with all her weight on the blade, but I held her off me easily. We stayed locked like that, her bending over me, trying to chop my head off with the Sword of Mars, and me flat on my back with Excalibur staving off certain decapitation.

  “There’s just no gentlemanly way out of this one,” I muttered, then decided that maybe my mother’s teachings about being gentle with women didn’t hold with immortal magic-using women who wanted to destroy the world. My conscience assuaged, I reached up with my right foot and kicked Lilith right in the stomach.

  She flew back a couple of yards, landed flat on her back but immediately rolled to her feet and charged me again, her black sword held high to slice me shoulder to waist. I sidestepped her and brought Excalibur around to parry her slash. The crash of our swords rang across the field as we dueled. She slashed, I parried. I thrust, she spun away and countered. I ducked and flashed out a kick, which she jumped over, coming down with a vicious sword thrust. I twisted away and sprang upright with a stroke at her neck that had Lilith bending over backward like a wire-fighter from the movies. But instead of coming back up, she put one hand behind her head and continued into a backflip, catching me on the chin with the toe of her boot.

  My mouth snapped
shut, my eyes crossed, and I went down hard. I landed flat on my back, and my head crashed to the turf. I shook my head to clear the blurriness from my vision, but it didn’t work. Shit, a concussion, I thought as nausea rolled across me. I rolled over onto one side and puked onto the field, then scrambled to my feet before Lilith could recover and drown me in my own puddle of puke.

  I had a second to survey the field before Lilith closed on me again, and I saw Anna throwing magical blasts toward the portal, only to watch them bounce off the shielding Lilith’s wizards erected. Sweat beaded on the witch’s forehead, and King looked frazzled as he dispatched wave after wave of attacking monster. Greg and Abby had their hands full taking down the bad vampires, while Rabbit and his Morlocks scurried up from the storm sewers to attack the flanks of the werewolf gang. Nester and his cops dove straight in at the weres and the other assorted beasties, using modern tactical techniques and tech to combat centuries of magic and might. It looked like the magic and might were slowly winning, as officers started to get too close and fall to the superior strength of the trolls and ogres.

  I heard the crunch of grass behind me, and knew Lilith was trying to sneak up on me. I turned to face her, and caught her boot heel right in the gut. I bent over, and she crushed my nose with a knee strike. The force of her blow stood me up, and I staggered backward, tears streaming from my eyes and blood pouring from my nose. Excalibur fell to the turf beside me as I instinctively put both hands to my face, trying to put everything back in place. My vision cleared just as I heard a triumphant shriek from Lilith, and I looked up just in time to see her charging me, her sword aimed at my unprotected heart. I was defenseless, swordless, and about to die.

  I had failed. I was going to die at the hands of a crazy woman from the dawn of time, and most of my friends were going to die with me, not to mention most of the people on Earth. I saw Lilith thrust with the sword and knew I couldn’t get out of the way fast enough. It was done. I closed my eyes, not wanting to see what happened next.

  “STOP!” The command came from everywhere at once, inside my head and out, like someone had wired my skull into the stadium’s sound system. I opened my eyes, and Lilith stood frozen in front of me, her sword inches from piercing my heart. I looked into her eyes and saw a mixture of fury and fear written across her face that I had never seen before. I tried to move and couldn’t. I was frozen in place as surely as Lilith, no matter my struggles.

  “THIS ENDS. NOW.” The power in that voice was incredible, enough to tear down buildings and level mountains. Finally able to turn my head, I looked at the platform in the middle of the field and saw Zepheril, formerly Phil the fallen angel, former owner of the Fallen Angel’s, and Lilith’s former boss. He did me a solid a year or two ago, and we helped him ascend back into Heaven. Now he was a full angel, complete with amazing white aura that turned the darkness over the football field into brightest day. His wings stretched at least eight feet across, and he wore what looked like stylized armor, with plate greaves, bracers and breastplate, and gleaming chain mail underneath. The armor glowed with its own light, or reflected the illumination coming off the angel—I couldn’t tell which.

  Zepheril circled over the field and returned to hover some ten feet over the platform. He looked at the frozen combatants scattered across the grass, then looked up at the portal, where the grey forms of sluagh were frozen midway in their passage through. His attention turned to Lilith and me, and I suddenly felt the weight of his focus on me. It was like every impure thought I’d ever had was laid bare, from looking up Gina Adams’s dress in fifth-grade assembly to the rage that flowed through my veins as I killed Paulson just last night. All that, and I wasn’t the real focal point of the angel’s attention.

  “Lilith,” Zepheril called.

  “What do you want, Phil?” Lilith was never known for being the respectful employee.

  “What are you trying to do? Destroy the world? Tear down Heaven?” Zepheril looked truly confused, like he couldn’t understand Lilith’s motives. Maybe he couldn’t, since he was an angel again, but when he was fallen, he certainly understood the baser of human instincts. After all, he’d run a strip club.

  “All I want is justice. I’ve been banished here for sixty millennia, don’t you think I’ve served my time?”

  “It doesn’t look as though you’ve learned anything from your time among the humans, Lil. And that was the whole point, wasn’t it? For you to learn about humanity and about humility?”

  “Humility? From these rodents?” Lilith sneered. “These hairless apes would still be shitting in ditches in the backyard if it weren’t for me.”

  Zepheril sighed. He looked down at Lilith and said, “You know I can’t touch you. The Father decreed that long ago. But I don’t have to let you drag the universe into the darkness, either. This plan of yours, using the sluagh to march on Heaven and demand that the Father see you—it doesn’t work that way. You don’t get to just storm the gates and stand there screaming like a toddler until you get the attention you want. I’m sorry, Lilith, but this is over.”

  Zepheril raised a hand, and time started to flow again. I could move, and all around me men and monsters were coming to the same realization. The wizards, wolves, and vampires in Lilith’s horde looked around and started to slowly ease toward the stadium exits. A few Morlocks or weres pursued, but within a matter of a minute or so there was a steady stream of creatures of the night abandoning Lilith’s ship and heading for the hills.

  Two dozen or more reanimated vampires and humans stayed, the purple light of the sluagh glowing in their eyes. They clustered around Lilith, who glared up at the angel with her jaw set and fists clenched.

  “I’ll never give up, Zepheril. Send me to Hell, angel. It will be a matter of just a few years before some other idiot human calls me back.”

  “Maybe, but I can make sure these bastards won’t be coming with you,” Zepheril said, and waved his hand at the portal in the air. The portal, before now just a pool of purple-tinged blackness hanging in the air, started to undulate, flashing purple, blue, red, white, and eventually gold. The portal began to shrink, and Zepheril raised both hands to the sky.

  “In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, I command you to leave this plane, never to return. Begone!” His voice rolled across the football field like thunder, and as I watched, the filmy grey forms rose from the heads of the men and women surrounding Lilith and streaked toward the shrinking portal. The sluagh still trying to come through to our side reversed course, sucked back to Hell by Zepheril’s command.

  “Not bad, Phil,” I said, looking up as the portal started to shrink and the roiling shield of energy over the stadium collapsed into a shower of magical sparks.

  A shriek came from behind me, a sound born of fury that had been brewing for thousands of years, and I turned to see Lilith bearing down on me, sword raised high over her head. She was too close for me to avoid, given the beating I’d taken. Excalibur lay on the turf ten feet away, and all I could think was please, be there. I closed my eyes, knowing that in the worst case, I’d at least saved the city. Then I heard an impact like a heavy punch, and opened one eye. That’s when the crack of the gunshot rolled across the field.

  Five feet away, Lilith stood holding her chest as blood poured from a fist-sized hole in her torso. The Sword of Mars tumbled from her grasp and stuck into the turf, and Lilith dropped to her knees. I looked around and saw a slight form standing atop the nearby Central Piedmont Community College Science building. The figure waved, and a beep sounded in my ear. I pressed the Bluetooth headset to accept the call, and the most welcome voice I’d heard in days came on the line.

  “Are you gonna kill this bitch, or am I going to have to dump your ass for real?” Detective Sabrina Law said over her cell.

  “You got it, lady,” I said, and pressed the button to end the call. I picked up Excalibur and took two steps toward Lilith. I put everything I had felt over the past few weeks into that blow. All
the fear, all the frustration, anger, grief, and loneliness that I had suffered at Lilith’s hands and my own ran down my arms and into the blade.

  Lilith tried to block the blow with her arms, but Excalibur just sheared right through her forearms and neck in one stroke. Lilith’s head and hands dropped to the turf, and a shadowy grey mist rose from her body. It floated side to side for a second, then the portal in the sky flashed red, and Lilith’s soul rose up and through the portal. Zepheril bowed his head, waved one hand, and with a blinding flash of gold, the hole in the sky was gone, Lilith was gone, and the world was safe again.

  That’s when I heard Abby screaming my name.

  Chapter 32

  I LOOKED AROUND, and Abby was kneeling in the damp grass, a figure in black cradled in her lap. I could see her tears from where I stood, and I heard her sobs echo across the stadium.

  “No!” I shouted, and sprinted to her side. I heard footsteps and felt Greg’s presence behind me as I hit my knees beside Abby.

  She looked up at me, mascara making raccoon eyes on her face as tears rained down onto the pale face of Detective Michael Nester.

  The young cop looked up at me, blood trickling from his lips, and gave me a little smile. “Did we win, boss?”

  I blinked back tears of my own. “Yeah, Nester, we won. We saved the world. Again.”

  “Saving the world kinda hurts,” Nester said. Abby moved her hand from his neck, and I saw the wound. Kevlar body armor is great against bullets and a lot of human weapons, but it doesn’t do a damn thing against claws, and a werewolf had laid Nester’s neck open like he was filleting a steak. He’d lost a lot of blood and didn’t have much time left.

  I didn’t even think. I just grabbed his arm and pulled him to me. I felt my fangs drop, and I raised his wrist to my mouth. I was inches from biting down when a hand shot out and closed itself around Nester’s arm. I followed that arm up to the shoulder, then across to Greg’s face, where he looked at me, a picture of loss and regret.