The Black Knight Chronicles

by John G. Hartness

  “You realize you were never in the army, right?” I whispered.

  “I watched a lot of Stargate: SG-1. Now shut up and be still. There’s a trap here.”

  I looked down and didn’t see anything. I was about to say so when I caught a glimpse of it out of the corner of my eye. A thin monofilament line had been stretched across the passageway, going from a hook in one wall to an eyelet mounted opposite. I couldn’t see where the line went after it passed through the eyebolt, but I was betting it wasn’t attached to anything pleasant.

  “You going to disarm that?” I asked.

  “This isn’t Dungeons & Dragons, dude. Just because I’m wearing black doesn’t mean I have the Find & Remove Traps skill.”

  “Besides, you haven’t passed a Dexterity check in this millennium.” I chuckled softly when he flipped me off. “What’s the plan?”

  “I thought we’d try to not break the trip wire. How does that sound?”

  “Sounds good to me. After you.” I gestured grandly down the hall, and he took one exaggerated step over the trip wire.

  I saw the disturbed soil on the other side of the wire just a hair too late to keep him from stepping on it, then I heard a solid click from the ceiling. I felt a whoosh of air and reached forward to shove Greg to the ground. He sprawled facedown on the dirt, breaking the trip wire with his back foot. Nothing happened there, of course. He’d already triggered the trap when he stepped on the pressure plate on the other side of the dummy trip wire.

  I whirled to the left with blinding speed, but I still wasn’t fast enough to save Greg and get out of the way. Being a good friend and hero to the downtrodden, I chose to shove him to the dirt and hope that I survived the booby trap. Then the pole swung out of the ceiling and caught me square in the gut with a foot-long wooden stake.

  Chapter 20

  I stood for a long moment staring straight ahead at where my partner lay in the dirt. The stake had passed over his head by a hair and embedded itself about three inches below my solar plexus. I didn’t feel anything at first except the impact, but then the pain of the wound started in, and it took all the restraint in the world not to scream bloody murder. A ball of fire exploded in my stomach, and I sagged on the rod that held the stake.

  “Greg,” I croaked.

  “Yeah, what was that all about?” He rolled over angrily, but his eyes went very big when he saw the stake sticking all the way through my skinny frame.

  “Would you be a pal and pull this thing out of my stomach?”

  He nodded and reached up. The stake hung up on a rib, and he had to stand up to get enough leverage. Eventually, he put one foot on my chest and pulled, exertion making his face scrunch up and his forehead bead with pinkish sweat. With the grinding sound of wood on bone, which I felt as much as heard, he slowly pulled the stake from my midsection. After what felt like a year, but was probably only a couple of seconds, he got the booby trap out of me, and I collapsed to the tunnel floor.

  I lay in the dirt for a few minutes trying to recover as Greg examined the trap. “It’s really ingenious, you know,” he said, as he swung the pendulum that mere moments before had been embedded in my guts. “The fake trap concealing the real trap. That’s some serious Indiana Jones stuff there. And to use a stake on a stick? Genius, I tell you.”

  I wasn’t in a mood to really appreciate the brilliance of the trap that had impaled me, but as I stood, I put a hand on Greg’s shoulder, and said, “You’re welcome.”

  “What are you talking about? I saw it coming. I dove out of the way just in time. And besides, the stake got you just under the rib cage. It didn’t cause any major damage.”

  When I was finally able to stand up straight, he noticed that the hole in my shirt was level with his heart. Greg sometimes forgot that he was better than half a foot shorter than I was. He looked from my stomach to his chest, gulped deeply, and said, “Thanks,” in a very small voice.

  We continued down the tunnel, disarming a couple of other traps along the way. They were minor inconveniences, nothing really suited to taking out a vampire—a few poison darts, a couple of spears poking up out of the floor—standard adventure-movie gimmicks. After about half an hour of wandering around underground, the tunnel started to widen and light began to stream in from ahead. The tunnel ended at a high-tech-looking door set into the antique stone walls. A completely anachronistic digital keypad was set into the wall to the right of the door, and what looked like a retinal scanner was right above it.

  I tapped for a few minutes, trying out various combinations of UNC-Charlotte important dates on the keypad. Basically, that meant typing every variation of forty-nine I could come up with, since all I really knew about the college was their prospecting mascot, the 49er. I didn’t even know if it had anything to do with gold or with the fact that NC Highway 49 ran right past campus. Given the originality of my home state, I’d put my money on the latter. After watching me for a little while, Greg pulled out his cell phone and a funny cable, pushed me aside, and started his geek-fu on the keypad. He got at least as far as I did, but, five minutes later, we were still on the wrong side of the door.

  “Scoot back.” Greg’s frustration made him growl a little. I thought I even saw a hint of fang.

  “For what?” I asked, moving back into the tunnel a couple of feet.

  “For Plan B.” He grabbed the doorframe in both hands and pulled.

  Greg was really strong, like drop-a-bus-on-your-head strong, but even so, it was all he could manage to pull that door out of the frame. After healing my stake wound, it was all I could manage to stand upright, so I just stood back and watched as the veins popped out in his neck and he turned a couple of really odd shades of red. He got a little movement in the frame, let go, bent his knees to get a lower grip, and wrenched the door out of the wall and over one shoulder. The door turned out to be about eight inches thick and solid metal. It was the wall around it that finally gave way, not the door, and two-hundred-year-old bricks fell in all around us as the tunnel shook from Greg’s efforts. He dropped the door off to one side, and I was almost bounced off my feet from the concussion.

  “Color me impressed,” I said, peering past him into the room beyond the doorway.

  “Color me herniated,” he gasped, both hands on his knees. “If you see something round on the floor, it’s my O-ring. I want that back.”

  “You’re disgusting. Give me your flashlight.” The doorway led into a chilly room dimly lit by wall sconces, but the dust from the door’s destruction made it hard to see. After a few minutes, I stepped into the room to get a better look. The room was big, with high ceilings. Shelves lined every wall and made aisles all through the room. Every shelf was full of bottles, and when I pulled one from a rack, I realized where we were.

  “Greg?” I asked.

  “Yeah, what?”

  “We’re in a wine cellar.” Then I took a better look at the bottle in my hand. Instead of a vineyard logo and a year, the label had a name and a photograph of a college-aged girl taped to it. Apparently, I held a bottle of Stephanie, 1963. I took out the cork and sniffed. Sure enough, we were in what had to be Professor Wideham’s blood cellar. The blood smelled pretty good, especially for a vintage from the Kennedy era, so I tipped the bottle and took a swig.

  It was blood, but it was blood cut with red wine to make it last. Apparently, Wideham had figured out how to mix fermented grape spirits with fresh human spirits to make a pretty tasty treat. It wasn’t something I thought would catch on at the local supermarket, but it had a nice bouquet. I drank about half the bottle, then passed it to Greg.

  “Top off the tank,” I said. He took the bottle and sipped cautiously. “What?” I asked. “I drank it and thought it was fine.”

  “Yeah,” he replied, “but you drink Miller Lite by choice.” He finally turned up the bottle and drained it dry, licking his lips afterward.

  “Not bad, huh?” I asked.

  “Not bad at all. Maybe we’ll ask this Professor Wideha
m, or whatever his name is, how he makes it.”

  “Before we cut off his head?”

  “I think we’ve got a better shot at an answer if we do it before.”

  “Good point. So let’s find him, get his secret recipe and cut off his head.” I started moving through the stacks of bottled blood wine toward a staircase. Greg followed close behind, and we took the stairs up, pausing at the door atop the staircase.

  “What if he’s not up there?” Greg whispered.

  “Then I eat whoever is up there and make them tell me where to find Wideham.”

  “Not necessarily in that order,” Greg corrected.

  “Good point. I get the info, then I eat them. Plan?”

  He looked like he wanted to pick apart the finer points of my plan, like the eating people part, but finally just sighed and said, “Plan.”

  With his approval, I turned the knob and stepped out into a very busy restaurant kitchen, surprising two dishwashers and three cooks and making one poor waitress faint dead away.

  Greg and I stood stock-still for just a moment, then he pushed past me, pulling his long coat closed over his utility belt and holding his wallet in the air and shouting the one word guaranteed to empty most restaurant kitchens: “Inmigración! Inmigración!” He walked through the kitchen masquerading as an ICE agent, and the employees scurried like vampires at a tanning bed convention. In about thirteen seconds, we were alone with the unconscious waitress and one very angry head chef.

  The chef picked up a big knife and looked like he was about to part Greg’s hair with it. I tapped him on the shoulder. He whirled around, looked into my eyes and froze as I mojo’d him into pliability. “Sleep,” I said, and he collapsed like a balding sack of potatoes.

  “I think we took a wrong turn at Albuquerque, doc,” Greg said in his best Bugs Bunny voice.

  “Yeah, me too. And we need to get out of here before whoever owns this restaurant shows up. Because if they knew about that little wine cellar, they’re tied to Wideham. And they might be more than we can handle on our own. This isn’t a new setup, and it hasn’t happened without some people with some juice knowing about it.”

  “Yeah, and the last time we tangled with anybody packing that kinda juice, I got thrown off a building.”

  I turned to look for an exit. “Then it’s fortunate for both of you that this restaurant is on the ground floor,” the Master of the City said from right behind me.

  Chapter 21

  “Really?” I said to the air. “This is really happening?”

  “What is really happening, Mr. Black?” Tiram asked, obviously not happy to see me in his kitchen.

  The Master Vampire was impeccably turned out again in a suit that cost more than my car, complete with Italian leather shoes and a pocket square. I didn’t even know they still made suits with pocket squares. Of course, he might have had that suit for a generation or two.

  “What is happening is that in fifteen years of living here and being what I am, I had no idea you existed. Now I’ve run into you twice in thirty-six hours, and I’m not happy about it.”

  Greg slunk around behind me, putting as much distance between himself and Tiram as possible. I didn’t blame him. It might not have been Tiram who tossed him off a roof, but he certainly had the power to do us serious harm, and I wasn’t convinced that Greg had completely healed.

  “Somehow, I believe that I may even be less thrilled with our recent level of contact than you are, Mr. Black. Now, why are you here? What were you doing in my wine cellar?” He motioned to the door behind me.

  “We were looking for a vampire calling himself Professor Wideham. We followed the tunnels from his lair to your cellar, and came up the stairs hoping to find him here.” I figured there was no point in lying about it. It wasn’t like we could have come from anywhere else.

  “And why are you looking for the professor? I would have thought that the antics of his group would not appeal to you.”

  “They don’t. He and his rejects from Lost Boys II torched our home, almost killed one friend of ours, and kidnapped a police officer. We intend to get her back and get a little revenge.” I showed a little fang and let my eyes go black around the edges.

  Tiram’s eyes widened when I mentioned Sabrina’s abduction. “That was not authorized, I assure you. Feel free to mete out whatever punishment you feel appropriate under the circumstances.” He turned to go into the restaurant. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have impatient customers that I will now be forced to bespell into thinking they had a delicious meal, and it seems I need to find new kitchen staff as well.”

  “Hold up there, Spanky.” I grabbed his elbow before he got too far away.

  I heard a sharp intake of breath from Greg, and Tiram turned back to look at me. The little smile that had played across his face since he first caught us in the kitchen was gone, and I felt a little bit of the will of a real Master Vampire hammer at my mind. I pushed past it, throwing him out of my head, and saw his eyes widen.

  “Is there something else I can do for you?” he asked after a second.

  I let go of his arm. “You said the attack on us wasn’t authorized. But something was. What was authorized, and by who?”

  “By whom, Mr. Black. Everything that happens in this city is authorized by me, of course. And when Professor Wideham told me you had been spying on him, I granted him permission to destroy your lair. I did not authorize an attempt on the life of a fledgling vampire, nor did I give my blessing to Detective Law’s abduction. Now, if you’ll excuse me?” He made to turn around again, but I dashed around him, blocking his path.

  “How did you know the friend they almost killed was a vampire? And how did you know they took Sabrina?” I got very close to Tiram’s face to watch his reaction, but it wasn’t at all what I expected.

  He threw back his head and laughed like I’d told a really funny joke for once. “Mr. Black, until very recently you have had only three friends in all the world. Mr. Knightwood is here with you. Miss Law is a detective, so it reasons that she was the kidnap victim, and poor Father Maloney is in the hospital. How is the good father, by the way? Please tell him I inquired about his health, won’t you? So, given that information, the only person left that you could have possibly stretched to consider a friend is young Miss Lahey, so newly turned by my lovely Krysta. Now that I’ve proven that I do indeed know more about you than you know about me, or will ever find out about me, may I go on about my business? Or must we have another unpleasant encounter?”

  He looked up at me without any mojo, without anger and without the slightest hint of fear. He just stood there, supremely confident that, if there was an “unpleasant encounter,” he would come out ahead.

  I figured he was right, so I got out of his way.

  “We’re not finished, Tiram,” I said to his shoulders as he went out into the restaurant.

  “Oh, no, Mr. Black. We’ve only just begun.” The swinging door closed behind him.

  I turned to Greg and found him leaning heavily on one of the long metal prep tables. He looked paler than normal, and I saw his hands shaking a little as he tried to get himself under control.

  “You all right, pal? Everything’s okay. We didn’t have to kill the big bad guy. It’s cool.” I tried my best to reassure him, and after a long minute or two, he got himself together.

  “Yeah, I’m okay. But Jimmy?” He raised his eyes to mine, and I hadn’t seen him that scared since we slipped the video camera into the girls’ locker room in seventh grade and caught the gym teachers doing the deed in the showers.

  “Yeah, bro. What’s up?”

  “I don’t ever want to mess with that guy again. He scares the crap out of me.”

  “Me too, Greggy. But I’ve got a really bad feeling that we’re not going to be able to avoid him forever.”

  “Yeah, I feel it, too. But let’s give it a shot, huh?”

  “Will do. Now, you got any great ideas about how to find Wideham and his goofballs?”


  “Yeah, I’ve got two. But you’re gonna hate both of them.” He looked at the floor, and I was pretty sure by his words that I knew what was coming.

  “Really?” I asked with a sigh.

  “Anna and The Guys have the best sense of what’s weird in town, man. Between the four of them, they should have some ideas about where to start looking.” Greg still wouldn’t look at me, but he had the little smirk bouncing around on his face that I really hated.

  “You’re probably right.” I groaned. “One meeting with Anna in a day is too many for me. You deal with Her High Priestess-ness, and I’ll meet you at the comic shop around eleven. That should give them time to get the civilians safely to bed, right?”

  “I doubt it. This is Game Night, so there’ll be people there all night. But on the plus side, that means that all three of the guys will be there.” He didn’t mention that he’d get to try out his new Magic: The Gathering decks, or whatever he played nowadays. I’d always been a nerd, but my partner’s geekitude truly knew no boundaries.

  “Great. Just what I need after a long week—a dive headfirst into the great unwashed horde of Dorkdom.” I turned and headed into the restaurant.

  I stopped cold at the scene before me. The restaurant was full and gorgeously decorated in a classically elegant style. There were lots of high-backed booths for privacy, marble floors and leather chairs, and not a screaming kid anywhere in sight. The clientele was as high-tone as the decor, Charlotte’s version of the glitterati out for a gourmet meal, and by all appearances, everyone was having a grand old time—eating, drinking, laughing and chatting like all was normal. I even saw a waiter bringing a check to one table, as a man in a tailored dress shirt and tie folded his napkin onto his plate.