The Black Knight Chronicles

by John G. Hartness

  “How’d that work out for you?” I asked. Greg elbowed me in the ribs and I shut up.

  “Not well. We were defeated, obviously. The rebels who repented and promised to serve loyally were given their places back in the Host, while those of us who stood by our principles were cast out, forced to live among you worms as a constant reminder of exactly who the favorite children really were. And Lucifer was sent to rule in Hell. He took nine of his closest compatriots with him, and they became the Archdukes. Baal was one of them.”

  “Wait a minute,” I interrupted. “Baal was once an angel?”

  “Haven’t you been listening?” Phil looked at me like a disappointed teacher, which is a look I was all too familiar with. I love getting put in my place by angels. It’s like adding insult to insult somehow.

  “Baal joined Lucifer in Hell, and I became one of the Fallen here on Earth. I watched your civilizations, as if the word were even applicable, rise and fall. I watched your societies mature and decay, and over time I came to realize that I had been not only a fool, but a coward as well.” The angel stopped and took a breath. I got the feeling he’d been waiting a long time to tell this story, but hadn’t had the right audience.

  “I couldn’t return to Heaven, and I couldn’t go to Hell. I was trapped here until I could do something to warrant an audience with the Father again. I had to do something to make him notice me, to remember me, so I could tell Him . . .” Phil’s voice trailed off and he blinked rapidly.

  “Tell Him what, my son?” Mike asked, and I saw him as his parishioners must see him, as a wise man, a holy man. My oldest living friend almost glowed with an internal peace that made even me want to confess to him.

  But we didn’t have all night.

  “That I’m sorry and I want to come home,” Phil said quietly, shoulders tense and head bowed.

  “Just ask Him,” Mike said so gently I was afraid for a second that Phil was going to cry.

  Phil fell to his knees right there in the gym, and Mike joined him. The rest of us followed suit, except for Lilith. Mike looked over at her, and raised an eyebrow.

  “I don’t kneel. Ever. To anyone. It’s my thing.” She sat down at the table, leaned back in her chair and propped her spike-heeled boots on the table.

  “He knows,” Mike said. “He knows.” Then he took Phil’s hand. “Now, Phil. Ask Him.”

  Phil looked up and one tear ran slowly down his cheek. He took a deep, shuddering breath and choked out, “Father, may I come home?”

  I’d never seen Phil look contrite before. Of course, I’d never seen him cry, or fight a demon before either, so it was another night of firsts for me. Yippee, another learning experience.

  “I think,” Mike followed the angel’s gaze with his own “all you ever had to do was ask.” Then Mike put Phil’s hands together and raised them straight over his head.

  Nothing happened for a moment and then Phil began to glow with an incredibly bright, white light. I could only stand a few seconds of the glare, and even squeezing my eyes shut I knew I’d be seeing spots for a while. When the glow faded, I opened my eyes, and Mike was standing there, with no angel beside him.

  Lilith looked around for a minute, and then muttered, “Sonofabitch! He didn’t leave me any instructions other than to take care of the club.”

  “What does that mean?” I asked. She treated me to a look that could kill someone who was actually living.

  Lilith took a deep breath and said, “I owed Phil a debt. Since he didn’t absolve me of it, I’ll have to keep his business operations running until he does, or until the period of my service comes to an end. So I’m stuck here for a while.”

  “How long?” Greg asked. He kept trying to sneak peeks up her skirt as she leaned back in her chair, but he was about as subtle as a hand grenade.

  “Five hundred years, minus time already served,” Lilith answered.

  “How much time have you served?” I asked.

  She shot me another look. “Two weeks.”

  I looked around at Greg, Mike and Sabrina, and we all burst out laughing. After a few seconds, Lilith got up and left without so much as a good-bye. She did not strike me as a woman who was accustomed to being laughed at, which could go badly for us. Chances were we’d have to deal with her for the next few centuries.

  Chapter 38

  After our little chuckle, I sat up straight and looked at Janet. “So how do you plan to put all this right, lady?”

  “What is there to put right?”

  “What is there to—what is there to put right? Your little spell goes wonky and a passel of little girls end up kidnapped, a dozen zombies tear up most of Charlotte, a cop—”

  “Detective,” Sabrina put in.

  “—detective gets sent to Hell and we trash an entire private school gymnasium. And all because you wanted to win the Powerball! That’s what I mean, you nutjob!”

  “You’re asking for the impossible. I can’t possibly do much to change things. But for starters I promise never to do magic again, even the kind that summons angels.”

  “Demons,” I corrected.

  “Well, I meant for it to summon angels. That nice man at the Career Day explained it all to me. The spell would summon the angels, who would perform three wishes for me—”

  I held up a hand. “Wait a minute. What nice man at Career Day?” I had a sneaking suspicion I knew which “nice man” she was referring to.

  “Mr. Arthur. He runs a chain of tire stores. We got to chatting about how school funding kept getting cut, and vocational education was getting hit worst of all, and he gave me a prayer book that he said would summon angels. But it didn’t so I must have done it wrong! But I really wanted to help, doesn’t that count for anything?”

  Everyone around the table yelled in unison “NO!” I made a mental note to have a long conversation with the Tire King about the difference between angels and demons someday very soon.

  Janet had the good grace to look ashamed, even if she didn’t have a good answer. After a long moment, Greg broke the uncomfortable silence.

  “Hey, look. The sun’s going to be coming up soon, and this building is no longer what I would consider light-tight, so at least a couple of us would like to get home. The rest of you are welcome to crash at our place if you like, but we need to get going.”

  “I can’t,” Janet said. “I have to get home to Mr. Kibble. He must be frantic with worry about me.”

  “Don’t worry. You weren’t really invited. And who the hell is Mr. Kibble?” I asked.

  “My Pomeranian. He’s very high-strung and gets terribly nervous if I don’t make it home in time for dinner.”

  “Whatever. Look, lady, I’m keeping an eye on you, and if I so much as see you buying the wrong color candles near the summer solstice, they’ll have to identify you by your dental records. You got me?” I gave her my best intimidating stare, which was helped a little by the blood spattered all over my clothes.

  She nodded and scurried out the door before I remembered that she might not have an intact car in the parking lot.

  Then I couldn’t manage to care. Oh well, now that she wasn’t possessed by a demon, I figured the rest of her problems would pale in comparison.

  “What about you two?” I asked, looking at Mike and Sabrina.

  Mike shook his head, “I’ve got to get to the church for morning Mass, but I’ll swing by later for lunch. I’ll drive you, though. My car is still in one piece, and I moved it right up to the gym entrance.”

  “I’ll come hang for a little while, as long as there’s no biting while I nap,” Sabrina said, standing and holding out a hand to me. I took it and she helped me up. I didn’t really need it, but the feeling of her warm hand in mind wasn’t something I was likely to pass up.

  “No promises on the biting,” I said as we started toward the waiting car.

  Greg limped past us, leaning on Mike and yelled “Shotgun!” over his shoulder at us. I didn’t mind.

  “There’s j
ust one thing I don’t understand,” I said in a low voice as Sabrina and I walked down the steps into the parking lot. The eastern sky was barely beginning to lighten from black to deep blue, so it was definitely time to get rolling.

  “Just the one thing?” she asked.

  I punched her lightly on the arm, and she staggered a few steps sideways. Sometimes I forget that I’m not punching Greg.

  “When you were taken, and Mike got thrown out of the gym, he mumbled something about you being an innocent.”

  “Yeah?” She had that look that women get when I’m about to ask something that’ll get me slapped.

  “And if I remember right, there were certain criteria for being a sacrifice to raise this demon, and one of them was a very specific brand of innocence.”

  “Yeah?” she repeated, and unlike Mike, Sabrina had obviously mastered the art of raising only one eyebrow. She was either daring me to go there, or warning me not to go there. What to do? What to do?

  “So by being part of the sacrifice, does that mean . . .” I trailed off and Sabrina interrupted me.

  “Let’s put it this way, Jimmy-boy. If you finish the question, you’ll never know the answer.” She kissed me lightly on the lips, and we got in the car and rode off into the sunrise like good vampire heroes.

  (Continue reading for Book 2)

  Book 2:

  Back in Black

  Chapter 1

  A vampire and a cop walk into a bar . . .

  I so wish that was a joke instead of my agenda for the evening, but we really were pulling into a bar parking lot. There were a lot of Harleys lined up out front of the club, and while that’s usually a good sign for me, this wasn’t my usual hangout. My comfort level was already low—this visit wasn’t my idea, and my escort for the evening was Detective Sabrina Law, the exceptionally attractive investigator for the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department who had helped me save the world from plunging into Hell a couple of months ago. And, until today, I hadn’t heard from her after our bout of hero-for-hire. Not so much as a peep for eight weeks and four days, not that I was counting.

  I looked around the parking lot, taking note of the still-running limo parked at the front door and the click-click-click of the cooling Harley engines parked behind it, and pulled my coat tight around me against the January chill. I didn’t feel the cold—vampires don’t feel cold, but nerves about whatever mess Sabrina had gotten me into were giving me a chill or two. I took a deep breath, held out my arm for my “date,” and started across the asphalt toward our oh-so-sleazy destination.

  The strip club formerly known as Heaven on Earth had been renamed Fallen Angel’s when the last proprietor got his express ticket back to heaven punched. The apostrophe was in the correct place on the sign, but nobody knew that outside a select few supernatural types. Phil, the last owner, had really been a fallen angel, and Lilith, the immortal whatever-she-was who took over Phil’s business operations when he left, had a wicked sense of humor. And a wicked sense of everything else.

  When Phil had been around, the club had been pretty upscale as strip clubs went. A strict dress code had meant that Greg Knight, my partner in Black Knight Investigations, and I’d had to do laundry whenever we were on surveillance there. Under the previous management there had been more luxury cars in the parking lot than pickup trucks, and the girls had looked like they’d stepped off the pages of Playboy. Phil’s attention to detail had helped set the tone, garnered the “classy” strip club customers.

  More than the name changed when Phil left the place in Lilith’s unwilling hands. Apparently the original “other woman” had lost a bet to Phil, chaining her to his business interests for five hundred years. I was around when Lilith figured that out, and she hadn’t been happy. So she had surrounded herself with people more to her liking, which meant that Fallen Angel’s catered to a slightly different clientele than it had when it was Heaven on Earth.

  I looked at the bar and then the woman who’d be going inside with me. One of these things is not like the other. Detective Sabrina Law was going to stick out like a banana in a smokehouse, a fact that I tried to impress upon her when she showed up in my bedroom, yanking me from a particularly pleasant and very specific dream featuring her, a case of whipped cream, and three Daleks. Don’t ask.

  She shook me awake and waved her badge in my face, leaving me no doubt that I’d been talking in my sleep again, and that she’d heard me. She wasn’t smiling when she looked down at me and said, “I need to see Lilith. You’re going with.”

  I wasn’t really any happier, because my best friend, roommate, fellow vampire and business partner chose that exact moment to barge in without so much as a knock on my suddenly revolving bedroom door.

  Greg wore kneepads, a gas mask and an apron that said “Bite the Chef” with little cartoon fangs on a yellow smiley face. He topped off the outfit with elbow-length welder’s gloves and thick rubber boots. Greg looked at me, then at Sabrina, held his toilet brush high above his head and announced in a muffled voice, “Bathroom’s clean! We got a case! Be ready in a jiff!” Then he turned and waddled off into his bedroom to change out of his haz-mat gear and into his crime-fighting costume. An actual crime-fighting costume.

  I watched my portly partner not close the door behind him and looked up at Sabrina. “Since you’re obviously not here for a social call, you wanna wait for me in the den? There’s beer in the fridge.” I grabbed the corner of my sheet and started to sit up to get dressed.

  Sabrina’s eyes widened, and she turned to the door. “I’ll be waiting. Don’t screw around, this one’s important.”

  Like the last one wasn’t? Like a case where we saved Charlotte from becoming a literal Hell on Earth, wasn’t important? I threw on a pair of jeans and a faded X-Men T-shirt, and a few minutes later we were rolling to Fallen Angel’s.

  Greg and I looked over the crime scene photos on the way to the club, and we agreed with Sabrina’s instincts—it looked like there was a supernatural baddy running around Charlotte, and the best place to start looking was with Lilith. I kept trying to talk Sabrina out of coming inside as we pulled into the parking lot, but for a human, she was really, really obstinate.

  I was crammed into the backseat of Greg’s Pontiac GTO and really looking forward to getting out of the car. “Please don’t stare at anyone, or anything. Just keep your eyes on the floor, or on the girls. That’s usually safe. This isn’t like the clubs you’re used to visiting.”

  “I don’t frequent many strip clubs, Jimmy, but I think I can handle myself,” she said.

  “No, you probably can’t. Leave the badge and the guns here. Greg will keep the car running in case we need to make a quick getaway. The back door is to the left-hand side of the stage. It opens right out onto Morehead Street. If things get ugly, we hit the back door running. We’ll cross the bridge on Morehead and meet Greg in the Time Warner building parking lot. You good with that, partner?”

  Greg nodded. “Got it. I don’t like that place.”

  “I don’t either, but we gotta talk to Lilith,” I replied. “If everything goes well, we should be out in fifteen minutes.”

  “And if it doesn’t go well?” Greg asked.

  “Keep the car running.”

  Greg shifted into neutral, and Sabrina and I got out of the car. She put her Smith & Wesson .40 service weapon in the glove box, along with a revolver she wore strapped to one ankle. I tossed my Glock 17 into the backseat, then followed it with a Ruger LCP in an ankle holster of my own. I reached under my jacket and stripped off a belt with two daggers in it, then unfastened the Velcro sheaths from my forearms and tossed those knives into the backseat as well.

  I turned to see Sabrina staring at me. “What?”

  “Nothing.” She shook her head and turned to go into the club. We walked across the parking lot, and I watched Greg pull out onto the street. He turned right at the corner and drove a couple of blocks to the cable company parking lot. It was about a quarter-mile sprint fro
m the back door of Fallen Angel’s to the car, and I really hoped we wouldn’t have to test my legs.

  A pair of behemoths that looked like former NFL linebackers flanked the entrance, and one opened the door for Sabrina as we approached. “Serious bouncers,” she whispered.

  “Those weren’t the bouncers,” I said. “Those were just the doormen. The bouncers are inside.”

  We walked down a narrow hallway that was only dark if you were human. I could see the video cameras following our every move, and the two-way mirror along one wall. The hallway opened into a largish reception area with a dark wood desk in the center of the room. A small human woman sat behind it at a computer, a pretty blonde with not quite enough makeup to hide the bruise on her cheek.

  Sabrina stiffened at the sight of the girl, and I put a hand on her elbow. I moved past Sabrina and put two twenties on the desk. “James Black and guest. I believe I’m on the approved list.”

  The girl smiled at me and tapped on the keyboard. “You are, sir. Enjoy your evening.”

  “Thank you.” I stepped past the desk and a huge creature came forward from its hiding spot in the shadows of the room. It was about seven feet tall, looked to weigh about three hundred pounds of solid, blue-skinned muscle and had curling ram horns on top of its nominally human-looking face.

  “Spread ‘em,” the ogre growled.

  I held my arms outstretched obligingly, and it patted me down professionally. If the TSA hired ogres to do security, not only would they find anything people tried to smuggle onboard, nobody would ever complain. To their faces, anyway.

  Sabrina stepped up and looked at the ogre. “Do you have any female security guards? I’d feel more comfortable with a woman patting me down. You understand, don’t you?”

  I stared at the floor, giving it everything I had to keep from laughing. The ogre looked down at the smiling detective and growled, “I am female. Now spread ‘em.”