Dead Dwarves Don't Dance

by Derek J. Canyon

“Because I don’t turn people. Because this life isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Because you’d miss all those romantical sunsets you probably write maudlin poetry about. Because it’s not fair to the ecosystem to add another predator. Because we don’t really sparkle. All of the above. None of the above. Pick a reason, kid, any reason you like. I’m not turning you.” I started to look around for another way to get out of this mess, but it didn’t look good for our hero. Or at least my hero, and it’s my story.

  For a skinny little gamer-geek, he’d done a good job tying me up. I guess that’s another thing we can thank the internet for - unlimited access to fetish porn has improved the knot-tying ability of men who can’t get dates. I couldn’t exactly see my hands, but by straining around, I could see that my ankles were tied to separate legs of the chair with those plastic zip-ties you get in the electrical aisle. I could see a silver necklace wound around each tie, and by the way my wrists felt, he’d done the same thing there. The chair was the standard metal folding type, the kind that gets sacrificed in countless professional wrestling matches. So I was pretty well neutralized. The silver sapped the strength from my arms just by the contact, and I couldn’t get enough leverage with my legs to do anything useful. I looked up to try and Jedi mind trick my kidnapper, when I noticed two things – one - he was wearing polarized sunglasses, which was a neat idea, although ultimately useless against my mental abilities, and two – he was crying.

  “You have to turn me!” He wailed, tears streaming down his cheeks. “I’m running out of time and this was the only thing I could think of to fix it!”

  I couldn’t believe it; I was actually starting to feel sorry for the guy. “Okay, kid. Why don’t you tell me what’s wrong and I’ll see if I can help?”

  “No one can help, but if I were one of the Undead I could help myself.” I swear I could actually hear him capitalize undead.

  “You know that’s kinda my job, right? Helping people that can’t help themselves. Kinda like the A-Team, without the Mohawk and the van. Reach into my shirt pocket and grab a business card. I promise not to bite you, and as you know we Undead cannot tell a lie.” Total bull, but I’ve often found with people dumb enough to romanticize the whole vampire thing that a little mendacity goes a long way. He reached into my pocket and took out a business card. It had my name, James Black, and cell phone number under a logo that said “Black Knight Detectives, shedding light on your darkest problems.” Neither the company name nor the stupid slogan was my idea. And I prefer Jimmy.

  “You’re a detective?” I nodded. “And you think you can help me?”

  “Well, I can’t really know that until you tell me what your problem is. So why don’t you untie me, and we can talk about this like a pair of reasonable people?” I put a little mojo into my eyes, and he started towards me with a pair of wire cutters in his hand. And that’s when things went to hell.

  Chapter 2

  Just as the kid was almost across the room to me with the clippers in hand, there was a tremendous crash from the roof behind me, and in a shower of glass and rotted wood, a rotund form came crashing down through a skylight to lay sprawled on the floor behind me. From the curses that emanated from the same general vicinity as the loud THUMP I’d heard, I surmised that my partner had arrived to save the day. With his usual subtlety and success rate.

  “What the hell?” The kid whirled around to see what had fallen through the roof, my freedom momentarily forgotten. I did the only thing I could think of, I leaned forward onto my tiptoes and the front two chair legs, and turned myself around to watch the floor show. In the middle of a pile of rotted wood and broken glass lay the form of my partner, Gregory W. Knightswood IV. Yeah, he’s the “knight” in Black Knight Investigations. Greg looked a little the worse for wear from his fall, but I guess he could be grateful that none of the wood he fell on pierced his heart, or I’d be looking for someone else to share naming rights with. After a few more seconds of muttered cursing, Greg realized that he had an audience, and sprang to his feet, swirling his cape around him dramatically.

  At least that was the idea. It’s hard to swirl properly when part of the cape is tangled around your feet and another corner is draped over your head, but he gave it a hell of a try. Greg sometimes took the whole vampire thing a little too much to heart, and I was not surprised to find that this was one of those times. In addition to the cape, he was dressed all in black spandex, which was not a good look for a guy who topped out at 5’9” and weighed somewhere around two-twenty. He had on motorcycle boots, also black, and what looked like an honest to God utility belt. It was kinda like a cross between Batman and Danny Devito, only younger. At least he wasn’t wearing a mask this time.

  He fought with the cape for a few more seconds before finally mumbling something rude and tearing it to shreds. He looked at my captor with his most menacing stare and said, “Release my partner and live to see another sunrise.”

  I thought that was a pretty good line under most circumstances, but Greg didn’t know that the kid didn’t want to live to see any more sunrises. So he was a little taken aback when the kid lunged at him with a cross in hand. Greg stumbled backwards a step before his vampire abilities outweighed his natural clumsiness and he caught himself. Then he reached out, grabbed the cross from the kid and flung it across the room. The kid just began to look like he knew what kind of trouble he was in when Greg reached out and grabbed him by the throat, lifting him off the ground with one hand.

  At least, he lifted him a couple of inches, because Greg was way shorter than the kid and just didn’t have the height to properly impress the wannabe vampire. Greg and the kid both seemed to realize this at about the same time, and Greg tossed him across the room in the general direction of his holy symbol. Then he came over to where I was bound and began to free me.

  “Nice entrance,” I smirked a little.

  “You want to stay tied to the chair?” Good point. I shut up and let him go about the delicate task of unwinding the silver from my wrists and snipping the wire ties. At least the kid had dropped the wire cutters close by so Greg didn’t have to use his teeth, or something equally embarrassing. He’d just freed my right arm when I caught a glimpse of movement out of the corner of my eye. I opened my mouth to warn my partner when he turned on the kid.

  Vampires are fast. Like, ridiculously fast. And the first time a mortal gets a real eyeful of just how fast we are, it usually freaks them out. Not this kid, though. He was standing over Greg with a broken piece of lumber, probably what used to be a skylight, and Greg’s faster-than-human whirl didn’t give him a second’s pause. He swung from the heels and cracked the board right over Greg’s head with everything he had.

  “Ouch.” Greg said as he stared at my would-be kidnapper.

  “You’re still standing.” The kid had a good grasp of the obvious, I had to give him that.

  “Punk, the only thing you can do with that stick that will bother me is to shove it through my heart. And there’s no way I’m just going to stand here and let you do that.” Greg reached out and took the 2x4 from the kid. It looked like he tried to hold onto it, but Greg was way too strong for that. The board clattered end over end across the warehouse and Greg passed me the clippers. “Why don’t you finish the job? I think I need to keep an eye on your friend here to make sure he doesn’t do anything else stupid.”

  I snipped the last plastic tie, shook myself free of the silver chain, and stretched my arms and legs. Undead or not, being tied with your arms behind your back was damned uncomfortable. At least I didn’t have to worry about him cutting off circulation to my extremities. I stepped to one side and pointed at the chair. “Sit,” I ordered.

  “Are you going to turn me now?” The kidnapper asked.

  “No, but I am going to get a few answers, and I don’t particularly care if you give them to me willingly or if I have to compel you to answer me.” I’m not very good at compulsion, but I was willing to bet that he didn’t know that.

&nbs
p; “Okay, I’ll talk, I guess.” He sat in the chair as I looked around for a stool or something. Of course I’d been tied to the only chair in the place, so it looked like Greg and I would be standing for the interrogation. Speaking of…I looked around and found him poking through the kid’s backpack, which was lying in the open trunk of an old sedan. Apparently that’s how I’d been brought in, trussed up in the trunk of a Buick. Fantastic.

  “Now, what’s so awful that you want to be turned into a vampire to get away from it?” I asked.

  Greg’s head whipped around like it was on a swivel. “He wants what?”

  “Yeah, apparently young mister…” I paused and looked at the kid.

  “Harris. Tommy Harris,” he spluttered once he realized what I wanted.

  “Apparently young Mr. HarrisTommyHarris here wants to become one of the undead. He brought me here to turn him into a bloodsucking demon of the night. I haven’t figured out yet if he has an unhealthy affection for the taste of human blood, or just doesn’t like going to the beach, but that’s why he kidnapped me.”

  “Wow,” Greg said, slamming the trunk of the car and sitting on it. “He’s dumber than he looks if he thought he could just bully you into turning him. Isn’t he?” Greg gave me an odd look, like he thought I might have actually turned the punk.

  “Yeah, pretty dumb.” I decided to let whatever was on his mind go for the time being, I had bigger fish to fry, so to speak. “So, Tommy, what’s going on that’s so bad that you need to become a vampire to be able to deal with it? Maybe we can help. As I was explaining before my partner’s unexpected entrance…” Greg sketched a rough salute from the trunk of the car. “We are private investigators, and are pretty good at what we do. So maybe we can help you.”

  “I doubt it. I mean, I’m sure you guys are great detectives…”

  “We are.” Greg interrupted. I shot him a look that said shut up, doofus and gestured for Tommy to continue.

  “But it’s not a mystery, I just can’t stop it.” He finished.

  “Can’t stop what, exactly.” Greg reached into the top of his right boot and pulled out a blood pack. “Snack?” he asked me.

  “What flavor?” I replied.

  “O-positive. I didn’t know what you’d be in the mood for, what with the whole kidnapping thing.” He tossed me the bag and I ripped it open. As I began to bring the bag to my mouth I noticed Tommy looking even paler than he’d started as, which was no mean feat.

  “What’s wrong, kid? Haven’t you ever seen one of us eat?” I asked as I turned the bag up and started to drink. Nice, this one was fresh, no more than a couple of weeks old, and while the bag smelled faintly of Greg’s socks, being in his boot had kept the blood warm. It was smooth, obviously a young donor, without much in the way of contaminants, and the snack went a long way toward healing the burns the silver necklaces had made on my wrists and ankles.

  “No, I haven’t.” Tommy said in a very small voice. I finished the bag of blood and looked over at him. He looked like what he was, a very scared kid who had gotten way in over his head.

  “Well this is a lot cleaner than the old-fashioned way, let me tell you.” Greg piped up. He’d finished off a blood bag of his own and I wondered for a minute what flavor his had been. Each blood type had a unique taste, and different donors had their unique qualities, too. Finding a good batch in a blood bank was kinda like stumbling on a really expensive bottle of Bordeaux at Sam’s Club.

  Tommy looked a little sick, but he swallowed gamely and went back to his story, very careful not to look at either of us. “There’s a witch that I pissed off, and now she wants to kill me and my whole family. So all I could think of was to get you to turn me into a vampire so that I could kill her before she got to my family.”

  “Wow,” I said. “That’s one I haven’t heard before. Now how exactly did you find a real witch, and what did you do to make her so angry that you decided it was worth becoming a vampire to kill her before she killed you and everybody you care about?”

  “And more importantly, how did you find out about Jimmy and figure out enough about us to nab him?” Greg hopped off the car trunk and was beside the kid’s chair before he could even think about breathing. “Oh yeah, and we can smell it on you if you lie.” That’s not exactly true. We can smell fear, and usually people smell a little different when they’re lying, but this guy was so terrified already that I didn’t think it would make a difference. But he didn’t have to know that.

  “Well it all started with a girl,” he began. Doesn’t it always start with a girl?

  #

  If you enjoyed this excerpt from Hard Day's Knight, be sure to visit John G. Hartness' website at:

  http://johnhartness.com/

  Please enjoy this free excerpt, the first three chapters from my young adult action adventure novel: The Elemental Odyssey.

  It is a very different genre than Dead Dwarves Don't Dance, aimed at a younger audience. No pleasers or assassins or futuristic scumbags in this one. It still has action and science fiction in it, so I hope you'll like it.

  The Elemental Odyssey

  By

  Derek J. Canyon

  Copyright © 2011 by Derek J. Canyon

  Chapter 1

  From time to time he appeared, between the dark shadows cast by the strange moon. The silvery light glinted along his wide grin as his sensitive nose savored the sweet vanilla aroma of the trees. His eager eyes sparkled under a wide-brimmed hat and behind a dark mask. Tonight, his part in shaping the future truly began.

  He darted across a two-lane road that cut through the rugged forest and found a path on the far side. To his left, unwavering light illuminated a granite mountain with a massive sculpted face. As he moved through the trees, three more stone likenesses came into view, each towering high above. For a moment he paused to gaze up at the majestic visages, shining like beacons.

  The path grew brighter as he descended into a slender valley and came upon a narrow but vast amphitheatre, obviously designed to grant a spectacular view of the stone busts far above. He skulked in the shadows and observed hundreds of people listening to a woman as she spoke from the stage.

  The prowler crept from tree to tree. He snuck around stone buildings and between distracted passersby. Behind the amphitheatre, he hurried across a paved trail and up into a rocky stand of trees. Leaping over a black metal railing, he scurried between tall stone pillars decorated with dozens of distinctive banners quivering in the feeble night breeze.

  Leaving the avenue of flags behind, he padded through the Ponderosa pines, caressing them with his hands. The crumbling bark felt rough and dry, leaving his palms and fingertips feeling fresh and clean. The vanilla and butterscotch scent of the trees teased his sensitive nose. It had been a long time since he had enjoyed the soothing sights, smells, sounds, and textures of such a rich forest.

  “Hold it right there!” someone ordered, and a bright beam of light blinded him.

  He raised his hands to ward off the dazzle.

  “What are you?” someone asked hesitantly.

  “I could ask you the same question,” he responded, squinting into the glare.

  The beam of light dropped away from his face. A man stepped out from behind a tree, clad in dark pants, a light-colored shirt, and a flat-brimmed hat. The beam of light shone from a thick rod in his left hand.

  “I’m a park ranger,” the man said, pointing at a golden brooch on his chest. “And you…don’t look human.”

  “I am called Bozabrozy. And if I am not human, what would I be?” He bowed, but kept his hat on. He watched as the ranger neared, noting a black object attached to his hip, obviously a weapon of some sort.

  “Are you saying that’s a costume? It doesn’t look like a costume.”

  Bozabrozy wore a dark, wide slouch hat. Beneath a short cloak he had wrapped several belts and bandoliers around his shoulders and waist. His shirt and pants were also dark, but he wore no shoes. Fur covered his feet and hands and hea
d. His nose and mouth looked more like a snout and muzzle full of sharp teeth. He kept his ringed tail hidden behind him.

  “In my home, it is customary to introduce yourself when you are gifted with the name of another.”

  “Park Ranger John Five Eagles,” the man replied, stepping closer to Bozabrozy. “That’s no costume. If I didn’t know better, I’d say you were a spirit. Something my grandfather spins tales about.”

  “Five Eagles,” Bozabrozy pondered. “That is a fine name. It speaks of the sky and, therefore, power and royalty. Your grandfather is proud of it, as is the rest of your family, no doubt. Mother, father, brother, and…sister?”

  John Five Eagles ignored his question. “What are you doing sneaking through the park?”

  “You have nothing to fear from me, John Five Eagles,” Bozabrozy said, moving his hand to his chest and the pouch-laden bandoliers. “Just let me pass and all will be well.”

  “That’s definitely no costume. You’re some kind of…animal man!” The ranger stepped forward. “You’re coming with me. Turn around and put your hands on your head.”

  “I don’t have time for this. Great things are afoot. You must not interfere.”

  The ranger pulled the black weapon from his belt and pointed it at Bozabrozy.

  “Turn around. Now!”

  Bozabrozy sighed and obeyed.

  “That’s a tail!” Five Eagles gasped. “Hands on your head!”

  Bozabrozy placed his hands on his head.

  “This is not a very kind way to treat a guest.”

  Five Eagles stepped up behind Bozabrozy, returning his weapon to his belt. He grabbed Bozabrozy’s wrist and pulled it down behind his back.

  “No one is going to believe me if I don’t take you in,” he said. He noticed that Bozabrozy now had a small bottle in his left hand. “What’s that?”

  “You won’t take me anywhere,” Bozabrozy said, spinning around. With the reckless agility of a cornered rodent, he squirmed free of the ranger’s grip and threw the bottle at his feet. Shimmering blue light erupted around them. The tree trunks gleamed like an undersea grotto. Bozabrozy leapt away as the ranger stumbled amidst a shower of sparkling snowflakes.