Hard Day's Knight

by Hartness, John G.

  No, this is not the part of the story where we talk about vampire sex. It’s none of your business and has nothing to do with anything. I don’t sparkle, I’m no more perpetually horny than anyone (or anything) else, and I don’t use my vampire powers to get laid. Much. I’m not even particularly angst-ridden, and don’t know any vamps that are. Moving right along.

  I ordered a Miller Lite and told the bartender I needed to see the boss. He waved a thirty-something woman over who bore all the signs of an ex-dancer who had moved up, or at least sideways, in the world. “I’m Lil, I’m the manager here. What can I do for you?” She said, sliding onto a stool next to me. She had dark hair down her back and was dressed in black leather from head to toe. Her eyes hinted at some undefined ethnicity, but I couldn’t place her heritage.

  “I didn’t ask for the manager, miss. I asked for the Boss.” I put a little emphasis on the last word, so she might pick up on the idea that I knew more than the average lap-dance customer.

  “As far as you need to know, kid, I am the Boss.” She returned my verbal capitalization with one of her own, and raised me an auditory italics. She looked me straight in the eyes, and I got a little hint that there was more to her than a fading stripper with aspirations towards a GED.

  “Is there somewhere we can talk?” I asked, looking around at the gyrating bodies. It was loud in there, but not so loud that I wanted to get into all the supernatural aspects of life.

  “Follow me.” She slid off the stool and walked towards a dark alcove with “VIP” in pink neon over the doorway. I now understood how the neon industry was staying alive. Apparently it’s all being used in strip clubs. I followed her and noticed that the view from back there was, in a word, incredible. Ex-dancer or not, she still had plenty to display, and the tight black mini-skirt she was wearing displayed it very well. Odd, I thought, I’m following the most covered woman in the place, and she’s the one I think is hot. Well, I’ve always had a taste for the unique.

  We walked down a black-carpeted hallway with doors on one side. Each door had a light over it. Some lights were illuminated red, some green, and one was blinking yellow. Before I could ask what the caution light was for, Lil said over her shoulder “Time’s almost up in that one.” I didn’t want to think too much about what was going on inside the rooms, and I didn’t have to, because just past the room with the blinking yellow light Lil opened a door with no lights over it. I hadn’t even seen the door from the hallway, but when we entered, I saw it led into a spacious office complete with desk, a sofa, a full bar and a bank of monitors that covered the club, the parking lot and all the VIP rooms. I sat facing the desk as Lil went over to the bar.

  “Can I get you anything?” She asked as she poured bourbon over ice for herself.

  “No thank you.”

  “Are you sure? We have beer, wine, holy water, B-positive.” I whirled to face her when she got to “holy water” and found her facing me calmly with a small pistol pointed at my heart. “Sit down. I’m not going to hurt you. If I wanted to do that, you’d be dead.” I didn’t take my eyes off the gun until she walked around the desk, sat down, and put it in a drawer. Her left hand was out of sight somewhere under the desk’s surface and I had a sneaking suspicion that the pistol was the least of my worries.

  “Okay,” I said, sitting, “you know what I am. Is that a problem?”

  “Not for me. But you wanted to see the Boss, and he’s not a huge fan of vampires. So that could be a problem for you.” She sipped her bourbon and it took all I could do not to lean over to try and look under the desk.

  “I’m not a huge fan of angels, but Phil and I have done business before. He knows me.” I shifted in the chair so that my leg blocked most of my center mass from anything but a shotgun blast. I really hoped she didn’t have a shotgun. It probably wouldn’t kill me, but it would be damned inconvenient. And messy.

  “Indeed I do, James. And I still don’t know why you’re here.” Said a polished voice from behind me. I jumped almost high enough to touch the ceiling and when I came down I was standing facing Phil. His manager and her firearm fetish momentarily forgotten, I leaned heavily on the edge of the desk.

  “Sweet baby Jesus, Phil! If my heart still beat, I’d have had a heart attack! That’s just not cool, man. The whole teleporting thing is one thing, but sneaking up on people is something else entirely.” Phil was dapper, as always, in a black suit that was obviously tailored to his lean frame. Phil and I were similarly sized, about six feet tall with broad shoulders and thin builds, but he always looked better than me. It helped that he was a lot more muscular than me, and could afford a better tailor. Or any tailor, for that matter. Oh, and he was ridiculously good-looking. My hair is kind of mousy brown and sticks out everywhere, but Phil’s dark wavy curls always fell perfectly into place. It was like a print ad for men’s hair product, only three-dimensional and annoyingly real.

  Phil moved towards me, and even with my heightened senses, he was right in my face before I ever saw him move. “You know I don’t like that name to be used in my presence.” He almost hissed, and behind the rage in his eyes I saw something deeper, some kind of regret that was moving him on a visceral level. In a rare moment of sanity, I decided not to push. I broke off eye contact and looked down.

  “Sorry.”

  “Apology accepted.” Phil backed off a little and I could breathe again. “Now I owe you an apology of my own for startling you. Please let me offer you a drink. Lilith, would you please provide our guest with a drink?” He and the manager shared a look and I could almost feel the power struggle going on there. Just as I was starting to feel really, really uncomfortable, the name hit me.

  “Holy crap!” I yelped, and bounced back to my feet. They both turned to look at me, and I just stammered, “y-you-you’re Lilith? Like Eve before Eve but you wanted to be on top and so you got banished Lilith?” She looked at me very coldly but walked around the desk and stood right in front of me, almost as close as Phil had been a moment before.

  She looked me up and down and said, “That is one version of the story. There are others.” The way she said others made me think that story wasn’t her version, and that her version probably didn’t appear in any of the books I’d ever read, or would ever be able to read. Honestly, I didn’t think I was too interested in hearing her version. The look in her eyes told me that it might be a little heavier than I was ready for. “Now, would you like a drink?”

  I almost said that she’d already offered me a drink when I noticed that she had brushed her hair back off of her neck and tilted her head to one side in preparation for me to bite her. “Ummm…thanks, but no thanks. I’ve already had dinner tonight.” I tried to step back but my ass was already pressed up against the desk, so I had nowhere to go.

  “Please, I insist. It is a rare honor my Lord has offered you. You dishonor his gift and pass up an opportunity seldom given to one of your kind if you refuse.” She spoke so low it was almost a whisper, and looking into her eyes I thought for a moment that this must be how a mundane feels when I mojo them. It was almost like my will wasn’t my own, but it really was. I put my lips to her neck and breathed in the scent of her hair, and knew that I would drink. Her hair smelled like everything I missed about being alive, sunsets on the beach, summer afternoons in a park, fresh-cut grass, that intoxicating mix of salt, beer and cocoa butter of a weekend at the beach. I buried my face in the side of her neck and just held my mouth there for a moment, feeling the pulse under my lips.

  “You don’t have to be gentle.” She murmured into my ear, and then a hot spike of pain and pleasure ran down my neck and she bit my earlobe. I wasn’t. I sank my teeth into her with no concern for her well being, because I knew that whatever she was, I certainly couldn’t kill her. She put one hand behind my head and held my to her neck, while the other hand wrapped around my waist to rest on the small of my back. Feeding for me has never been a particularly sexy thing, I’ve never been much of one to
mix sex and dinner, but Lil was different. The taste of her exploded into my mouth, and I saw colors as my eyes rolled back into my head.

  I’ve been a vampire for a few years now, and I’ve drank from stoners, drunks, psychos, schizophrenics and club kids hopped up on everything from acid to ecstasy to the best coke to ever come out of Bolivia, and it all makes its way into the blood. But if there’s anything out there to compare with Lilith’s blood, I don’t think I want to know what it is. I took just the smallest sip from Lilith, and I thought the top of my head was going to blow off. Every hair on my body stood on end, and spasms went through every muscle.

  I stood there with my mouth latched onto her neck twitching like a kid that just peed on an electric fence, and the light show going on behind my eyelids was the kind of thing that gave Pink Floyd wet dreams. I drank from her for only a couple of seconds, but I stood there draped over her, gasping and letting her hold me up for several minutes while I came back to earth. It’s a good thing Phil didn’t have any grudges against me, because if he’d wanted to stake me then and there I couldn’t have done anything to stop it.

  After a long moment I got my breath back enough to gasp out “You’re an asshole, Phil.”

  “You didn’t like it?” I could hear the smirk in his voice as clearly I could hear the undertone of harp music.

  “Yeah, I liked it. It was incredible. The best thing I’ve ever had. And now I know you’ll never let me taste anything even close to that again.” I straightened up and walked on rubbery legs to the bar and poured myself two fingers of a very expensive scotch. The last thing I wanted to do was put anything in my mouth that would erase the taste of Lilith’s blood, but I knew that if I didn’t start forgetting that taste as fast as I possibly could, I’d keep putting off drinking anything. It wouldn’t take long for me to starve just out of fear of losing that amazing taste. So I slugged back the scotch and poured myself another.

  When I felt like I could look anyone in the eyes, I turned to face Phil. “What’s the deal? We’ve done business before without any of the games. What’s different now? Why the snack?”

  Phil took a seat behind his desk and gestured towards the chair I had vacated when he popped in. I sat, and he slid a coaster across to me. I should have known I wouldn’t be allowed anything so coarse as to put a glass on his desk. “Things have changed, James. The balance of power in our fair city is in flux, and it is in my best interests not to align myself too closely with either side.”

  “I don’t get it.” I figured there was no point in trying to play mind games with an angel, fallen or not. Aside from being more than a little outclassed in the brains department, I was giving up a few thousand years experience to Zepheril (or Phil as I called him when I was being obnoxious, which was always). So I went with honest stupidity, which has served me well so far.

  “There is a new player in town, James. A player with the potential to shift things significantly to one side or the other. And until I see which way the wind is blowing, I have decided that it would be unwise to make any specific alliances.”

  “Who is this player? Lilith?” I didn’t think that was the case. There was obviously something going on between them, but she looked way too much like she was the slave to his master, at least this week. I decided I had read that situation right when he leaned back in his chair and laughed.

  “Oh no, James. Lilith is my servant, at least for the moment. You see; she is here as a result of a wager. A wager that she lost.” He waved her over and gestured imperiously, and Lil sat on his lap like a very sexy and very dangerous kid with Santa at the mall. Only this Santa was a fallen angel, and this kid was older than Eve herself and had more issues than Reader’s Digest. “I speak of a tectonic shift in the balance of power, a change that may not only herald change for the city of Charlotte, but for the world as a whole.”

  That didn’t sound like anything I was going to like, and I was starting to think that my night was about to get a lot worse. “And this power has something to do with what possessed the little girl I fought last night and the missing kids all over town, right?”

  “But of course. And somehow, as usual, you have managed to find yourself right in the middle of it all.” And with one sentence, my night got a lot worse. I hate being right all the time.

  Chapter 11

  I took a minute to digest what Phil had just said, and then decided this was going to warrant another drink. I poured my third scotch and returned to my seat. “What kind of power are we talking about, Phil?”

  “I don’t really know, James. I only know that since the children have begun to disappear I have sensed a power growing in our fair city, and I have watched it with no small interest.” I think Phil reads too much, I mean seriously, who talks like that? But anyway, moving right along.

  “So you don’t know anything that could help me find it, fight it or kill it. Or if you do, you’re not going to tell me because you think it’s stronger than me and you’re afraid of pissing it off.” I was starting to get irritable with the angel, and that usually doesn’t bode well for the rest of my evening.

  “That is a pretty fair summation of the facts, yes.” Phil’s voice had gone a little cold, and there was a warning in his eyes that told me not to push this.

  I did what I always do when being warned by eons-old fallen angels; I ignored it. “What about you, Little Miss Sunshine? Do you know anything about the big bad?”

  Lilith looked at me through half-lidded eyes from her perch on Phil’s lap, and I actually blushed. I didn’t even know I could blush anymore, I’d assumed I wouldn’t ever have the blood flow for that again. “Little vampire, tread lightly. There are forces at work here that you cannot even imagine. I suggest you go back to your little hole and play your little video games. You do not want to be involved in this.”

  “You’re probably right. I don’t want to be involved. I’m no hero. I’m just a guy trying to make a living, cover my rent, and maybe find a nice fresh neck to gnaw on now and then. But like it or not, I am involved. There’s a scared kid out there who I promised to help, and as stupid as it sounds, I try to keep my promises. So please, tell me what you know, and I’ll get out of here and get back to the whole trying to save the world without getting my ass kicked too bad thing.”

  Lilith chuckled, an earthy laugh that made parts of me tingle that didn’t tingle very often since I had become a blood-sucking fiend. I was starting to get a pretty good idea where her powers leaned, and I gotta admit, it was a pretty good-looking lean. “Little vampire, if you insist on your own self-destruction you will never be able to taste me again. Is that really what you want?” She got up off of Phil’s lap and came to sit on mine. She twined herself around me in a pretty good imitation of a wetsuit, and it took everything I had to keep focused.

  “No.” I said in a small voice, and watched the gleam in her eyes grow into an inferno. “But it’s what I’ve got to do. Sorry, honey.”

  She got a very, very cold look in her eyes and I had a mental picture of her ripping my heart out with her bare hands and feeding it to me before she stood up, flounced back over to the corner of Phil’s desk, and sat down in a huff. “So be it,” she said in a voice like a frosty January window. “We are not entirely sure what is coming, but there is a major summoning in process. It requires the exchange of thirteen pure souls for the souls of thirteen of the damned. Whoever is performing this ritual must have some plan for the thirteen damned souls, and it seems to involve Samhain somehow. There have been eleven kidnapping victims so far, and their bodies have been inhabited by the souls of the damned. Until you interfered and released the latest damned soul into the city.”

  “Yeah, that wasn’t exactly my best moment. What’s going to happen to the girl who was possessed? Last I heard she was a little freaked out, but in decent shape.”

  Phil chimed in, “She will be susceptible to possession unless your friend the priest is able to provide her with some type of shielding.
The soul you cast out of her will not be able to return. But she will be more likely to see and hear the presence of souls around her than a normal child, and if she continues to dabble in the mystic arts, she will undoubtedly end up dead long before she finishes puberty.” I hate how much that bastard knows about everything. It’s not fair that he’s a bazillion years old and is tied in to all the bad guys in town. That plus high-speed internet access gives him way more information than I think is fair. But as usual, nobody asked the vampire.

  “And the soul?” I asked.

  “The soul will look for a host. Typically it will inhabit an empty body, but if one is not available, it will attempt to possess one weaker than itself.” Lilith looked like she knew more than she was saying, but a glance from Phil shut her up.