The Black Knight Chronicles

by John G. Hartness

  King slowed as we headed out of town toward our cemetery. I pulled out my pocketknife and opened up my wrist. I held Greg’s head higher and pressed my wrist to his mouth so he could regain a little strength.

  He latched onto my arm like a drowning man grabbing for a rubber ducky, and I felt the blood flow from my wrist into his mouth. I let him feed for a minute or two before I felt my strength start to ebb, then I pried him off. He’d gotten a bit of color back and was able to sit up a little.

  I looked down into his moon face and blinked back a tear. After all we’d been through, there was no way that bitch was going to get away with throwing my best friend off a building. We’d gone through puberty together, died together, fought demons together, gone to Faerieland together and laughed our way through all the Twilight movies together. Even with Abby on the scene, with whatever was happening with Sabrina, with Mike getting sick, with all that, Greg was my constant. He was my best friend, and Krysta was going to answer for this.

  He coughed a little and spit out a mouthful of blood.

  “You okay?” I asked.

  “Now I know how that coyote felt in the cartoons.”

  “I would hit you for that, but I’m afraid it might kill you.”

  “Yeah, me too.” He closed his eyes and leaned back against the cab of the truck. “I thought I was done for, man. I thought she was going to break my neck right there and twist my head off. I haven’t been that scared in a long time.” He kept his eyes closed, but even in the flickering streetlights I saw a hint of moisture around the lids.

  I put a hand on his shoulder. “Me too, bro. Me too. I’m just glad you’ve got a little bounce to you. I’d hate to train a new partner after all these years.”

  “Yeah, I don’t think Abby’s ready for the pistol range just yet.” He chuckled softly, and I felt him pull back from the edge. Greg’s always taken things a lot harder than me. Even back in middle school when the jocks shoved us in lockers and flew our underwear up the flagpole, he took it to heart. Me, I just shrugged it off and put sugar in their gas tanks.

  We got clear of downtown, and I banged on the cab again to get King to pull over.

  He pulled into a fast-food restaurant parking lot and got out of the truck. “Look, bloodsucker, if you dent my cab, there’s gonna be hell to pay.”

  He’d shifted back into human form, but apparently whatever magic made him change didn’t make his clothes change, too. The only things that had survived the shift were his boxer briefs, and it looked like he’d stretched some of the elastic to the limit, judging by how he held them up with one hand. I smirked a little, and he reached behind the seat for a suitcase.

  “Congratulations, King, you really are a redneck.” I complimented the baffled werewolf as he unpacked a Lynyrd Skynyrd T-shirt and a tattered pair of jeans.

  “We went to Clemson. He knows a redneck when he sees one,” Greg affirmed.

  “Good, you’re not dead,” King said to my battered partner.

  “Well, technically . . . ,” I started, but gave up. “I need to get something to eat. Wait here with Greg ’til I get back.” I started walking, but stopped short when I realized King was following me.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “I’m hungry, too. I burned a lot of calories shifting, and getting the crap knocked out of me didn’t help.”

  “I’m not exactly going in to order off the dollar menu. I gotta get my nutrients a little closer to the source, if you get my drift. I’ll just top off the tank, then you can go get a Happy Meal. Cool?”

  King nodded and stayed by the truck while I headed off in search of dinner.

  I took a position beside the kitchen door and only had to wait about five minutes before a grumpy Latino kid came out for a smoke break. He tapped a cigarette out of a pack from his shirt pocket, and then almost jumped out of his Reeboks as I spoke up behind him.

  “You know that stuff’ll stunt your growth.”

  “Dios mio! What the hell are you doing there, man? You trying to scare somebody to death?” The kid picked his lit cigarette up off the ground and looked up at me.

  Our eyes locked, and I pushed my will into his head, taking him over in the blink of an eye.

  “Stand up.” He did. “When this is over, you will remember nothing. You went out for a smoke, it wasn’t very good and you decided to quit. You will never smoke again. You’ll finish school and go to college. You will study hard and work hard and make a good career for yourself.”

  I tried to lay as much positive reinforcement on him as possible in the few seconds I had, then I grabbed the kid by the shirt and pulled him close to me. I bent his head to the side and bit deep into his neck. I felt his blood against the back of my throat like a hot crimson fountain. I could almost taste his heartbeat through the rush of blood into my mouth. My body gulped it down, starving to replace what I’d given Greg and what I’d burned up in the fight.

  The kid moaned a little as I drank, and I heard my own throat echo him. He sagged, and I put my other arm around his back to support him. I drank deeper than I’d intended and felt his heart falter a touch before I gave myself a mental shake and pulled back from him. I held him gently as he collapsed to the ground, then I leaned him up against the wall in a seated position. I ran a finger over his throat and used the tail of my T-shirt to wipe away the blood seeping from the already closed wounds.

  I stood up, a little dizzy from the influx of new blood and the nicotine in the kid’s system, and made my wobbly way back to the truck. King was sitting on the tailgate eating a sack full of cheeseburgers, and Greg shot me a disappointed look as I hopped into the bed of the truck.

  I said nothing, just reached over and took a long slurp of King’s super-sized coke. “Too much cola’s bad for you,” I said as he snatched his drink away from me.

  “Yeah, and drinking my cola’s bad for you,” he snarled, setting the drink well out of my reach. He wiped at the straw where I’d left a little red stain behind and looked at me quizzically.

  “You don’t want to know,” I said.

  “Then I already know.”

  “Then you don’t need to ask, so same difference. We can go whenever you’re ready.”

  “And where are we going, exactly?” King asked, finishing off the last of what looked like a dozen cheeseburgers. He walked a few feet to throw the bag in a nearby garbage can.

  “Home. We need to plan some more before we go after Krysta and her boyfriend. And Greg needs a place to heal up. And I could use a beer. Or seven.”

  “Sounds good enough. Let’s roll.” King hopped back behind the wheel, and Greg grabbed shotgun, then promptly passed out cold. I was stuck in the backseat trying to find a comfortable place to put my feet among several weeks’ worth of fast-food wrappers, soda bottles and dirty clothes.

  Chapter 14

  All thoughts of our housekeeping skills went out the window the second we pulled into the cemetery, because it was pretty obvious we wouldn’t be keeping house there anymore. A pillar of black smoke reached for the sky, and flames leapt a good twenty feet into the air as we parked in front of what used to be our caretaker’s cottage and underground lair. I jumped out of the truck and ran toward the house, but King grabbed me before I covered any real ground.

  “It’s gone, man.” He held me off the ground, my feet churning like a cartoon character. “There’s nothing in there that survived.”

  I relaxed in his arms with the realization that he was right. Everything we owned was gone. Just as I was starting to mourn the loss of my comic collection, I heard a girl’s voice rising above the flames in a tortured scream.

  “Abby!” I twisted free of King’s grasp and fell to the turf. My hands and feet clawed the ground uselessly for a couple of precious seconds as I tried frantically to get everything working together. Finally, I heaved myself off the grass and bolted into the burning house, yelling for Abby the whole way.

  For the second time in one night, it was very handy that I o
nly needed to breathe to make my vocal chords work, because the smoke poured from our underground apartment in thick black tendrils. I leapt down the stairs, crashing through the last few and gashing open my left leg. I fell face-first with my hands in a puddle of blue-tinged flame, then hastily beat out my burning sleeves as I fought to disengage from the splintered wood. I took a quick look around at an apartment fully engulfed in fire. Our furniture had been piled together in the center of the den to make a pyre, and something had obviously been poured around the whole room to make it burn like that.

  I pulled myself loose from the steps with a sick sound of tearing flesh, and yelled again for Abby. I doubled over coughing as I drew in smoky air to shout again, but I was able to get low enough to see her feet dangling from the far wall.

  I got down on my hands and knees and pulled open the door to the coat closet at the bottom of the stairs. I yanked my leather duster off a hanger and covered my head and shoulders with it so my hair wouldn’t catch fire. I blew out as much foul smoke as I could get from my scalded lungs and commando-crawled across the floor to where I had seen Abby’s feet. I got to her with vamp-speed, but lost a few precious seconds trying to figure out how she was floating on the wall. By the time I got to my feet, the fire had surrounded us, and I had no clear path back to the stairs.

  I turned back to Abby, and it finally sank in why she was still in the apartment with all that fire—she’d been nailed to the wall and couldn’t pull herself free. Thick silver stakes pierced her forearms just behind the wrist. They had been driven into the wall, holding her a good foot off the ground. Over her head, left as an unmistakable message for me, were spray-painted the same three Greek letters I had seen on the vamp lair. I decided in a heartbeat that I was going to kill a whole mess of frat boys before this was all over.

  Abby moaned and tried to pull away when I shook her shoulder to bring her around. I grabbed one of the stakes and tried to pull it from the wall, but it only wiggled between the bones of her arm, making her scream in agony. I yelled a little too because the hot silver burned my hand, then yelled again when I noticed the back of my duster coated with flames. I ripped off the coat and beat out the fire in a semicircle a few feet around us, then reached back up to grab the stake again.

  “Abby,” I said, trying to get her attention on my face instead of the pain in her arm. “We’re gonna do this on three, okay?”

  She nodded weakly, and I started to count.

  “One, two,” and on “two” I yanked with every ounce of strength in me.

  The stake came free, and Abby sagged onto me, howling. She screamed and thrashed around, clawing my arm and shoulder to ribbons where I tried to hold her up and beat back the fire at the same time. I reached over and yanked her other arm free, but this time the spike stayed stuck in her arm as they both came free from the wall. I’ll take what I can get, I thought as I turned back to where my stairs used to be.

  There was nothing there, just a pillar of fire reaching out into the cemetery. Abby was fighting like a crazed animal, so I set her down on her feet. She whirled on me and went for my throat, fangs out, but I was ready. I put one wrist in her mouth, effectively blocking her, then punched her in the side of the head with enough force to crush a human’s skull like an egg. Fortunately, vampires don’t get concussions, and with her stake wounds and burns, I didn’t think she’d even notice when she woke up. I tossed her over my shoulder and turned for the exit.

  I stomped out the last shreds of my duster and covered Abby’s face with it, then ran and jumped my way across the minefield my apartment had become. I reached the hole under where the stairs used to be and gathered all my strength for a vertical leap.

  I heard the crackling sounds of walls collapsing above and jumped for all I was worth for clean air and sky. I hurtled up through the fire like a scrawny, retarded phoenix, landing just long enough for my pants to catch fire, then executed another jump that would have made Jordan retire out of pure jealousy. With solid ground under me, I hotfooted—pun intended—it back to the truck where Greg and King were waiting.

  King pulled a small fire extinguisher from his rolling garbage dump of a vehicle and sprayed us down. I dumped Abby into the bed of the truck and hopped in beside her.

  “Get us the hell out of here,” I yelled, then fell to my knees as King floored the gas pedal.

  I had just enough time to make it to the side of the truck before the contents of my stomach and lungs came up. Black bits of ash mixed with blood and beer as King shifted into high gear and booked it out of the cemetery as the emergency vehicles started rolling in. I reached into my pocket for my phone to text Sabrina.

  Then, suddenly, the really bad news hit me. Despite the fact that my shoes were still smoldering, I got goose bumps and started to shake uncontrollably.

  “What’s wrong with you?” King asked through the rear window of the truck.

  “Sabrina wasn’t in there.”

  “That’s good, right?”

  “They’ve got her,” I clarified, staring at the lightening horizon.

  “Are you sure?” King asked.

  “She wasn’t in the apartment. Even through all the smoke I would have smelled her. They took Sabrina,” I said. “And it’s almost sunrise.”

  “So you can’t go after them, if you even knew who ‘them’ was,” he replied.

  “I’ve got a pretty good idea,” I said. I told them about the letters painted on the wall over Abby’s head.

  “Sounds like pretty solid evidence to me, but we still need to get you three indoors before you catch fire. Again,” King said. “So, where to?”

  “Only one place we can go when all hope is lost.” I pointed him toward a left turn.

  “A bar?”

  “Church.”

  Chapter 15

  The sky was getting light when we pulled into St. Patrick’s. I directed King around to the rectory. I beat on the door for what felt like an hour until a sleepy young priest finally opened it.

  “Can I help you?” he mumbled, tugging his shirt around to get the collar just right.

  “Where’s Mike?” I demanded.

  “I’m sorry, sir. Father Mike is on medical leave for a few weeks. He’s having surgery today. Is there something I can help you with?”

  Oh, crap. I’d forgotten about Mike’s surgery in all the fighting, shooting and burning. “No, thanks, Father. It’s personal with Mike and me. We go way back.”

  I saw the humor in his eyes and remembered that I had stopped aging at twenty-three. Mike and I were the same age, but he looked a lot older than his almost-forty, while I still got carded from time to time when buying booze. Good thing for me I usually stole my booze from my dinner dates.

  The young priest asked again if I needed any help, and while help was exactly what I needed, or at least near the top of the list, I couldn’t ask for help or blood from an unsuspecting clergyman. I thanked him again and limped back to the truck. My back and neck were really starting to sting from the fire, and I just hoped that I could heal burns, or Abby and I weren’t going to be nearly so attractive anymore. Greater loss for her than for me, but I’d grown accustomed to my face, as the song went, and I didn’t want it to be all melty for the rest of eternity.

  “What’s wrong?” King asked, as I got back in the truck.

  “My contact at the church, who happens to be one of my very best friends in the world, is in the hospital having a tumor the size of a golf ball removed from his esophagus today. I’d completely forgotten about this relatively important event because my house was just burned down. Or up, since it was a basement. My best friend and business partner is riding around in a werewolf’s pickup truck trying to heal from being thrown off a roof, and my new protégé is in the bed of said pickup while she tries not to scream in agony from being staked to a wall and set on fire. Add the fact that I just got my ass kicked by the Master of the City, a vampire I never even knew existed, and I’m having a pretty crappy night. Oh, yeah, and the clos
est thing I’ve had to a girlfriend since 1993 was just kidnapped by a group of stoner vampires, and I can’t do anything about it because the sun is coming up. So as far as ‘what’s wrong’ goes, did I leave anything out?” My voice might have gotten a little shrill by the end of my recitation, and the possibility existed that I bared a little more fang than I really intended, but those things could happen.

  “Nah, I think you covered it,” King replied. “So what are you gonna do about it?”

  “Thanks to this little issue I have with the sun, which is quickly rising, I’m going to do the only thing I can—namely, call in some reinforcements that don’t share my sunburn problem.”

  “Sounds like a fair plan.”

  “I’m so glad you approve. Now, do you have anywhere we can crash, preferably with a supply of B-negative in the fridge?”

  “Nope, after our little run-in with Krysta last night my hotel is probably being watched, and it has too many windows, anyway.”

  “All righty then, Plan D it is.” I opened the door and dropped the tailgate.

  “Plan D?” The werewolf asked, as I tossed Abby over my shoulder and started walking into the cemetery behind the church.

  “Yeah, grab Greg and follow me,” I called over my shoulder.

  “Follow you where?” he asked, but he did as I said.

  Where was a sizable crypt Greg and I had used on a few occasions when we were having issues with hallowed ground. It turned out that was all a psychological thing, not a mystical thing, but it never hurt to have a few extra hideouts up your sleeve. Or in your armpits if your sleeves had been burned off. The crypt was one of those old family ones that were more common in New Orleans than North Carolina, and there were no dates more recent than 1910, so we’d used it from time to time to crash. There was a big open space in the middle, a couple of benches on one wall and about two dozen plaques on another wall where the coffins were stored. I dropped Abby onto one of the benches, and King settled Greg on the floor along the wall with the plaques.