The Black Knight Chronicles

by John G. Hartness

  “I have enjoyed your company this night, and am proud to have fought alongside you. Be well, my friends.” And with a wave and a smile, he stepped through the hole in the air, and vanished.

  “I will never get used to seeing somebody do that,” Sabrina said.

  “You probably won’t need to, babe. I’m kinda hoping there’s not much need for portals to Faerieland in my living room,” I said.

  “Babe?” she asked, that one eyebrow shooting north.

  I tried to return the eyebrow, but without having my face pulverized I could only move them two at a time.

  She looked at me trying and laughed. “Call me whatever you want, Jimmy, but for tonight, call me a cab. I’m done.”

  “Take my bed. The sheets are clean,” I said.

  “No, I couldn’t. I’ll cab it home,” Sabrina protested.

  “Then have to cab it all the way back here tomorrow for your car? That’s silly. Go to bed. I’ll be fine on the couch. I don’t really sleep anyway, remember?”

  She started to argue more, then caught sight of Alex and Stephen watching us with smiles on their faces.

  “What?” she asked dangerously.

  “Nothing, cousin dear. We just think it’s cute,” Stephen said.

  “Think what’s cute?” Sabrina asked, voice dripping with danger.

  I pretended to be busy getting a blanket out of the linen closet because I didn’t need to be around if she shot them. Greg took that opportunity to mutter a quiet “good night” to everyone and run into his room, slamming the door behind him. I guess he’d seen enough bloodshed and brutality for one night.

  “You two have never even kissed, and you’re acting like an old married couple.” Alex laughed while he said it, which might be the only thing that kept him from certain death.

  He crossed to Sabrina and gave her a big hug. In the face of his hug and big grin she couldn’t even pretend to stay mad. “Cousin, it was wonderful to finally meet you. Now I’m going to take my husband home and put him to bed. Good night everyone, and thank you.”

  “Yeah, guys. We can’t thank you enough,” Stephen agreed.

  “That’s okay, Lenny thanked us plenty,” I said, pointing at the cash on the table.

  We all laughed again, and the guys headed toward the stairs and into the dawning light. Mike went with them, counting on his clergy bumper sticker to get him out of a Breathalyzer test. Besides, his church was close.

  Sabrina and Stephen took a moment at the bottom of the stairs, heads close together, talking softly. When they finished, he headed upstairs with Alex, and she walked back toward me, wiping at her eyes.

  “Wanna talk about it?” I asked, holding out a bottle of beer.

  “Not really. Family stuff. I thought you were out of beer?”

  “We were out of guest beer. We were not out of my private stash.” I smiled as I carried my blanket over to the couch.

  Sabrina stood at the doorway into my bedroom and looked over at me, holding up her bottle. “I get to drink from the private stash?”

  She raised that eyebrow at me again, and I knew it was going to take me a long time to get to sleep.

  “Detective, you can drink from whatever you want,” I said with a grin.

  “Maybe if you play your cards right, I’ll tell you the same thing someday,” Sabrina said, grinning right back at me.

  She turned, walked into my bedroom and closed the door.

  (Continue reading for Book 3)

  Book 3:

  Knight Moves

  Dedication

  To Suzy,

  my continual source of inspiration

  Chapter 1

  I narrowed my focus, giving all my attention to my unmoving target. He stood there, a little more than sixty feet away, almost mocking me in how little fear he showed. My heightened senses took in everything around me, the flickering fluorescent lights overhead, the smell of stale beer and garlic from the fat man just a few feet to my left, the touch of lavender shampoo on the woman behind me, the squeak of feet on hardwood, the crash of wood on wood all around me.

  Vampire speed and strength were no good to me now. This situation demanded all my concentration and probably more grace than I had at my disposal. I drew back, took careful aim, stepped forward and released.

  “Gutter ball!” Detective Sabrina Law raised her hands in victory as my last chance to pick up the spare and redeem my god-awful bowling game plummeted into the gutter and left the seven pin standing without so much as a wobble. It mocked me with its lacquered maple arrogance.

  “You win,” I said, collapsing into one of the spinning plastic chairs as Sabrina recorded our final scores.

  She beat me solidly, but I made a good rally in that final game and was within one spare of a tie.

  “Nice try, Black, but you can’t be expected to compete with a woman who bowls for the Police Championship League every year.” Sabrina sipped her beer with a smile. “The sweet taste of victory.”

  “Ringer,” I grumbled, reaching into my pocket for a twenty to cover the beer and slices we’d consumed while playing. Well, the slices she’d consumed. I’d been on a liquid diet ever since dying in the late ’90s, so it was just beer for me. That little detail also explained my choice of bowling at Charlotte’s only twenty-four-hour bowling alley.

  I returned to our lane and started taking off my rented shoes. The disinfectant spray couldn’t hide all the assorted smells from my heightened senses, so I drank more beer to keep from thinking about all the feet that had been in those shoes before me.

  “So . . . Jimmy,” Sabrina said after a minute or two of silence.

  “Yeah?”

  “Why here?”

  “Well, look, we’ve been working together for a while now, and hanging out, so I thought it would be nice to commemorate the date with a visit back to the place where we first met.”

  “That’s sweet. You mean the first place I ever handcuffed you to a plastic chair, don’t you?” She pointed to a broken seat at a nearby table. Six months had passed, and they still hadn’t replaced the chair. That case ended up with us battling an Archduke of Hell and saving a bunch of kidnapped children. Sabrina had been a fairly regular fixture in my life since then.

  “Yeah, that’s what I meant.” I raised my cup of domestic beer, and she clunked hers to it. “Cheers.”

  We sat in silence for a minute, drinking our beer and changing into street shoes.

  “So—” I said.

  At the same time Sabrina leaned forward and said, “Well—”

  “You first,” I said.

  “No, you go ahead.” She pointed back at me.

  “It’s getting late, and I’m kinda done with bowling. You wanna get out of here?” I asked.

  She gave me a teasing grin. “What did you have in mind?”

  She was going to force me into making the first move, and I didn’t know which moves were going to get me shot, and which moves might lead to something much better. Sabrina and I had been dancing around each other for months, ever since coming home from Faerieland, and I was still as clueless as ever. If given the choice between facing another Archduke of Hell or trying to figure out a woman’s mind, I’d take the cage match in Hades every single time.

  A new voice from behind me butted in. “Why don’t we try solving a murder?”

  I had never been so grateful and furious at my partner as in that moment. I turned around, and there was Greg Knightwood, the other half of Black Knight Investigations. He held my cell phone in one hand and my duster in the other.

  “You forgot something when you went out tonight,” he said, thrusting the phone at me.

  I stood, took the phone, and put on my coat. “No I didn’t. I left it at home. That doesn’t mean I forgot it. Why didn’t you call Sabrina?”

  “I did. Apparently she left her phone somewhere as well.”

  I glanced over at Sabrina, who was very studiously not looking my partner in the eye. Well, maybe my night had been going to be
better than I thought. Until now, of course.

  My duster felt heavy, and I checked the pockets. Greg had loaded my Glock 17 into one pocket, and my Ruger LCP backup gun into another. I had loops and sheaths sewn into the lining that held a couple of knives and four stakes, and they were all full, too. I raised an eyebrow at him, but he shook his head.

  “Well, let’s roll, then.” I slipped my phone into my jeans pocket and held my hand out to Sabrina.

  She stood without my help, and pulled her phone out of her purse. “Crap. Five missed calls,” she muttered.

  “Three of those are from me,” Greg said.

  “That means two are from my Lieutenant. Lovely. Well, Jimmy, I guess the date’s over. Sorry about that. Let me check messages and see where we’re headed.”

  “The university. Construction site for the new football field. There was a body found a couple hours ago. Coed, twentyish, blonde. Body seems completely drained of blood,” Greg said.

  I froze in the act of clearing the cups off the table. “Did I hear you right?” I said very quietly.

  “Preliminary examinations are showing that the body was completely drained of blood. So yes, you heard me right.” All the teasing was gone from Greg’s voice now. He knew what a big deal this could be.

  “Time of death?” I asked.

  “Site closed at 5 P.M., it’s now five in the morning. So at most twelve hours ago.”

  “No, not that long. Sunset was at 7:30, so figure time of death for eightish at the earliest. That’s still eight or nine hours. We gotta move.” I might have shoved a couple of people out of the way in my rush, but I don’t think any of them fell too hard.

  Greg and Sabrina hurried to catch up. We got to the parking lot, and I looked at Sabrina. “Do you have any kind of portable LED flasher that I can put on my car?”

  “Yeah, in my purse.” She started to reach for it, but I was already moving down the aisle of cars to where I’d left my Honda.

  “Greg, follow me tight with your flashers on,” I said, counting on his vamp-hearing to save me from shouting.

  He was moving fast toward his car, but I knew he’d heard me. Sabrina was almost running to keep up with my fastest walk, but I didn’t slow down.

  I got to the car and flung the door open. I slid behind the wheel and pulled out into the aisle. Sabrina slid into the passenger seat, rolled down the window and put a small square box on the dash. She pressed a button, and flashing blue lights strobed out. I jammed the car into gear and peeled rubber in the Concord Mills parking lot.

  “I didn’t know you could burn rubber in a Civic,” Sabrina said.

  “We don’t have a lot of time. Can you call ahead and get us added to the case. Tell them Greg’s an exsanguination expert or something. But we have to get to that body before it’s moved.” I took a left out of the parking lot, taking the back way to campus from the big mall.

  “Why?” Sabrina asked.

  “Because I only know of one thing that drains the body completely of blood, and that’s a vampire. And what happens when a vampire completely drains a victim?” I didn’t take my eyes off the road. We took a curve at eighty, and I managed to keep all four wheels on the ground. Barely.

  Realization flashed across Sabrina’s face. “Oh, shit.”

  “Yep, if we don’t chop off the victim’s head in time, there’s going to be a new vampire in town.”

  Chapter 2

  We pulled into the crime/construction scene just as our friend Bobby, the assistant coroner, was loading the body into an ambulance. I pulled the car over and sprinted toward the police line, only to come up short as a skinny young cop too new to even have creases in his uniform held up one hand and put another on the butt of his gun.

  “Stop right there, sir.”

  I was impressed. His voice barely shook. I stopped, and was about to drop the mojo on him when I heard Sabrina’s boots on the gravel behind me.

  She held up her badge and said, “It’s okay, Officer, he’s with me.”

  “Lieutenant McDaniel said no one but CMPD personnel inside, Detective. I’m sorry, but your friend will have to stay out—”

  “These are not the droids you’re looking for. Move along,” I said, locking eyes with the young officer. “You don’t see me or the fat guy behind me. Detective Law came on the scene alone. And you hate the taste of doughnuts.”

  “Good luck down there, Detective. It’s pretty bad,” the young cop said, ignoring me completely as he lifted the yellow crime scene tape for Sabrina to duck under. I threw one long leg over the tape and moved to intercept Bobby, but the guard dog with a badge had slowed me up too much, and Bobby was already pulling away.

  I looked over at Greg and waved him down toward the crime scene. “Go see what you can find out down there. I’ll meet you back at our place after I take care of this.”

  He nodded and started down the hill.

  I tossed my keys to Sabrina. “You drive. Let’s roll.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “We’re going to chase down an ambulance and cut the head off a dead girl,” I said in as casual a tone as I could muster as we ran back up the hill to my car, trying to keep another vampire from being born in Charlotte.

  Bobby didn’t have much of a lead on us, so we were able to catch up to the ambulance right before he pulled onto the interstate.

  “How do you want to do this?” I asked, as we pulled up tight behind the emergency vehicle. As with the norm for dead passengers, Bobby ran with his lights on, but no siren, and obeyed the speed limit. After all, his cargo wasn’t in any hurry for anything. At least as far as he knew.

  “I thought I’d pull them over, and you’d mojo him into oblivion, then we’d figure out what to do about the girl.”

  I already knew what we had to do about the girl, but Sabrina obviously wasn’t quite ready to talk openly about it.

  “Well, it sounds like as much of a plan as we ever have. Let’s do this.”

  She nodded and pulled around the ambulance, the little blue dashboard light glaring bright in the darkness. She waved the ambulance driver over to the side of the road, and we both got out.

  Bobby rolled down his window but didn’t get out. “What’s going on?”

  “Turn off the vehicle. We need to talk to you,” Sabrina yelled over the noise of the engines. Bobby complied and joined us behind Sabrina’s car.

  “Oh,” he said, as he caught sight of me. “It’s you.” His tone was flat, a little angry.

  “What’s with the attitude, Bobby?” I asked.

  “I saw what happened to that girl. I know what you are. And I’m not stupid. I put two and two together, and I got you killing this chick. And that ain’t right, man.”

  I tried to interrupt, but he was obviously on a roll. Bobby went right on talking over me, and that doesn’t happen often. “Regardless of our business arrangement, and the fact that I might feel a little betrayed to think you’re dissing the service I provide and taking your meals on the hoof these days, I don’t hold with killing. Especially not with killing cute chicks.”

  Sabrina arched an eyebrow. “But it’s okay to kill ugly girls?”

  “There’s a surplus of ugly in the world, Detective, but a finite number of hotties. It doesn’t do to be taking them out of circulation.”

  I jumped in before things went from absurd to downright bloody. “Okay, Bobby, I get your point. But we’ve got two problems here. One, I didn’t kill that girl. So get off your high horse. That means there’s another vampire in town that none of us knew about before tonight.”

  At my mention of another vampire, Bobby suddenly looked a lot less sure of himself. “What’s the second problem?”

  “Your cargo was drained completely. That means she’s going to wake up a vampire. A very hungry vampire. I don’t think you want to be the first thing she lays eyes on when that happens.”

  “Oh, crap.”

  “Oh, crap is right. Now get in the car with Sabrina. And find some way t
o bloody your nose.”

  “Huh? Why?”

  “Because I’m going to take care of this, and that means you need to get hijacked. This is just more guessing on my part, but I don’t think you want me punching you in the face any more than you want to be Blood-Bank-Barbie’s first meal.” And of course, I heard it—the unmistakable sound of an industrial-strength zipper opening inside the ambulance.

  “Bobby?”

  “Yeah?”

  “You want to be running now.” I grabbed his arm and spun him toward Sabrina. She shot me a startled look, but I just growled, “Get out of here. I can’t deal with her and keep you safe.”

  Sabrina and Bobby ran for her car just as the ambulance’s rear door flew open from the inside.

  Bobby was right. The girl had been beautiful in life. She was blonde, looked to be about twenty, and built to break hearts. She wore a bloodstained UNCC 49ers sweatshirt and strategically torn blue jeans, with a pair of boots that should have been registered as lethal weapons.

  She dragged pieces of the body bag behind her as she came out of the ambulance, and her face showed nothing more than hunger and insanity. It had been a long time since I’d seen a newly awakened vampire, and while she was cuter than Greg at his coming-out party, she was no less raving. Her fangs were fully extended, and her eyes rolled in their sockets, as if they wouldn’t focus. Then, suddenly, they did. She locked her eyes onto me like a pit bull on a sirloin and leapt out of the ambulance.

  If I’d still been alive, I would have died. Since I’d been dead a lot longer than she had, and had taken a few judo classes, I was able to roll with her and throw her to the pavement. I glanced up to see Sabrina’s taillights peeling back into traffic and caught a fist right on the chin for my trouble.