The Black Knight Chronicles (Omnibus Edition)

by John G. Hartness

  “Me, too, Officer. Now give me your handcuff keys.” His eyes went glassy and he reached around to the back of his belt and handed me the keys. I unlocked the cuff around my wrist, relieved to find that my mojo wasn’t permanently on the fritz. It simply didn’t work on one particular badass Amazon warrior princess cop.

  “Thanks, Officer,” Greg said politely. “You never saw us.” Then we split up. Greg headed towards the kid’s home to see if he could pick up anything there because he’s more sensitive to psychic garbage than I am. Psychic anything is right in his wheelhouse.

  I concentrated on what I do best—looking for things to hit and annoying pretty women. Toward that end, I headed toward the center of activity in hopes of finding Detective Law. I used her ever-so-helpful business card and my PI credentials to badge my way into the mobile command tent they had set up in the schoolyard, and tapped her on the shoulder.

  “Lose these?” I dangled her handcuffs from one finger. The cops around us let out a couple of wolf whistles and I put on my best imitation of a rakish grin.

  It probably worked a little, because she stepped in close to me, reclaimed her handcuffs, and whispered in my ear, “I don’t know how you got loose, or how you got here, and I don’t really care. But you’ve got about three seconds to get out of my crime scene before I shoot off something you’re probably inordinately proud of.”

  I looked down and saw her Smith & Wesson pointed at Little Jimmy and stepped back quickly.

  As much as I usually enjoy banter, we were on a deadline. “This is getting old. Why don’t you take me outside?” I turned around and put my hands behind my back, making it easy for her to re-cuff me. I also made sure there was no furniture nearby.

  “Oh, I will. Mostly because I don’t want everybody to see me beat the crap out of you.” She put a hand on my elbow and walked me out of the tent. As soon as we were in some relative shadow, I stopped walking. She had to stop, too, because, despite my skinny frame, she couldn’t move me. She looked up, confused.

  “You want to take these cuffs off me now,” I said.

  “I don’t think so,” she spat.

  “It wasn’t a question.”

  She got right up in my face and was about to say something that probably would have accomplished absolutely nothing when I dangled her cuffs in front of her face. It was worth petty larceny to see the look on her face. She got another look entirely as I crushed the handcuffs into a mangled mess of steel and dropped them at her feet.

  “Don’t bother trying that again.” I kept my voice low, and my expression calm. I needed her, and whether she knew it or not, she needed me. She started to go for her gun, but I caught her hand as she was reaching for it. “Don’t,” I said. “You’ll never make the draw, and it wouldn’t matter if you did. You know that somewhere in the hindbrain that protects you. Now ignore all this—me, what I am—for a little while. Believe me when I say that if I’d wanted to kill you, I’d have done that already. All I want is to get this kid back home safely. You’ll find that I’m happy to take orders, but we need to work together.”

  “Why should I believe you?” she asked.

  “You’ve already checked us out. You know we weren’t anywhere near the crime scenes. Right?”

  To her credit, she didn’t try to act like she hadn’t followed up on us. “Yes. You’re apparently just what you say you are—

  a couple of low-rent private eyes with no priors. That doesn’t explain why I should let you in on a police investigation.”

  “Looking around this joint, I’d say you’ve pulled in every resource you can lay your hands on. I’d guess that you’re about one missing kid away from calling in a pet psychic to interview the family schnauzer. Just call us consultants.”

  “I know how to get you on the case, asshole. What I don’t have yet is a good reason why to put you on this case.” She crossed her arms in front of her chest, and I looked back at her face, disappointed.

  “Because we’ve proven that you can’t get rid of us?” I asked hopefully.

  “That may be true, but I don’t have to enable you. Now I’m going to go interview the parents. Stay the hell away from them, and stay the hell away from my investigation. I can’t keep you off public property, but if I catch you interfering in my investigation again, I can sure as hell put you in the county jail for obstruction of justice.”

  I stepped back. She stared at me for a minute, and if looks could kill, I’d have been dead all over again.

  I looked at her for a long moment and finally nodded. “You win, Detective. We’ll stay out of the way.” I turned and headed toward the school.

  “Hey,” she called out after me. “Wait a minute.” She took a couple of long strides over to me and leaned in close. “I don’t know how you did that little handcuff trick, but it’s gonna take a lot more than that to scare me. When I get done with this mess, I am going to find out what your deal is. And if I don’t like what I find, you’re going to be very unhappy for a very long time.”

  I looked at her for a minute. “I’ve been unhappy for longer than you can imagine. Without an end in sight.” I turned around and walked off in the direction of the school to see what I could find about a missing little girl.

  I kicked myself a little for letting her needle me into that parting shot. I’m not the brooding type, but something in her eyes made me miss being human, just for a minute. I’ve gone whole years without missing the sun, but right then the prospect of never being able to wake up next to a beautiful woman and watch the sunlight play across her back and legs was enough to make me ache.

  I had been lost in my thoughts for a minute or two when I caught a strange scent on the air. I scanned the sidewalk ahead and pulled out my cell and called Greg.

  “Yo. Where you at?” I asked.

  “God, your grammar gets worse the longer you’re dead. I’m on the roof of the school. I found something funny up here. Where are you?”

  “About to hop the playground fence over by the swings. Are you where you can see me?”

  “Yeah. And fortunately for you I’m the only one who can see you. The cops assigned to the school are all out front and inside. How’d your conversation with the hot cop go?”

  “About like all my other conversations with beautiful women,” I grumbled.

  “That bad, huh? Well, come up here and take a look at this.”

  “I’ll be up in a second.” I crossed the playground, trying to figure out what the smell was. It wasn’t quite sulfur, but it had a little of that acrid tang to it. I couldn’t place where I had smelled it before, so I took a running leap onto the roof and walked over to where Greg was kneeling in front of what looked like a protective circle.

  I’m no magician, but I’ve read a lot of comic books and I know a magic circle when I see one—as long as the circle is drawn by someone with a taste for 1970s Marvel comic villains. This one passed my very limited quality control.

  Greg had dabbled in magic when we were in high school, so he had more actual knowledge of the mystical arts than I did. Of course, a retarded orangutan that has walked through a magic shop once has more knowledge of the mystical arts than me. Still, I felt qualified to make this call. “A protective circle?”

  “No, it’s wrong.”

  “Nope, pretty sure it’s a circle, bro.”

  “Yes, I know that. But look at these symbols.” He pointed to several scribbles and squiggles around the inside of the circle. “These should be on the outside of the circle, so that whatever was summoned into the circle couldn’t scratch them out and alter the protection of the circle.”

  “What if you weren’t trying to pull something into the circle?” I asked.

  “What do you mean?” Greg looked at me with eyebrows raised.

  “Well, couldn’t you cast the circle around you, then do a summoning spell so that whatever you summoned couldn’t get you before going off to wreak havoc? You’d be safe. It’s probably not foolproof or exactly the safest thing in the wo
rld, but would it work?”

  Greg’s sat down on the roof with a thud. His eyes got big. “I hadn’t even thought about that. That’s so awful I didn’t think anyone would consider it.”

  “I think someone did. You don’t get eaten, and when you send the whatever back to wherever all you have to do is erase the circle, right?” I wasn’t sure what I was missing, but it looked like it was going to be bad. I hate having smart friends.

  “What’s so bad about that? Really? You don’t get it?” Greg replied. I mentioned I hate having smart friends, right?

  He went on. “What’s so bad is that once you summon a whatever from wherever without a circle to bind it, then that whatever is free to do whatever it likes to whoever it wants to do it to, without you being able to banish it to anywhere, much less to wherever it came from in the first place!”

  “Not to be the king of understatement or anything, but that doesn’t sound good,” I said as Greg’s explanation began to sink in.

  “Yeah. If you hide in a circle and don’t bind a demon, for example, into another circle, then that demon is just set . . . free. It can’t get you, but it can do anything it wants and you don’t have any control over it, except maybe where and when you summon it.”

  “The timing. The girls,” I said in almost a whisper.

  “Yeah, the girls,” Greg agreed. “Whoever summoned the demon must have waited until they were the only ones left around, then cast the spell.”

  “But how would they know they were getting the right girl?” I asked.

  “I don’t think it mattered. I think the summoning party wanted to be sure the demon took an innocent. Which innocent it got was irrelevant.”

  “So some little—this little girl just drew the short straw?” Even with everything I’d seen, that didn’t sit right with me.

  “Pretty much.” Greg sat there on the roof, looking at the circle and shaking his head. I reached out a hand and pulled him to his feet.

  “Come on,” I said, walking toward the edge of the roof.

  “Wait a sec. I gotta blow this up first.” He reached into his utility belt and sprinkled a white substance on the circle. A pale blue smoke hissed up from the roof, and the circle disappeared.

  “What was that?” I asked.

  “Salt. It’s bad juju for magic stuff. Now this circle can’t be used again.”

  “Good deal. Now let’s get moving.” I resumed walking to the edge of the roof.

  “Where are we going?” He asked, falling into step beside me.

  “Back to the playground. I smelled something funky, and we might be able to trace this thing by the scent.”

  “Sometimes I think you only keep me around for my nose,” he grumbled.

  “And your car. But you’ve got a better nose than me, so I need you to take a whiff, tell me if it’s important, and if it is, you need to track the whatever it is to wherever it went.”

  “All right, I’ll play bloodhound, but if you try to put me in one of those stupid doggy Christmas sweaters again, I’m gonna stake you in your sleep.”

  Chapter 18

  We circled around the playground a couple of times before I caught the scent again. I waved Greg over to where I had smelled it, and he took a deep breath. “Smell that?” I asked.

  “Yeah, dude. Smells like vindaloo.”

  “Good. We know the kind of demon then.”

  “No, you magic-backward moron. Chicken vindaloo. It’s an Indian

  dish with a lot of curry. Should be pretty easy to follow in this white-bread part of town.” Greg took off toward the fence and I followed, trying not to lose him while still keeping an eye peeled for the cops.

  Trailing the Big Bad was always so much easier when the Scooby gang on Buffy did the trailing. They rarely had cops crawling their turf. Of course, Buffy was usually trying to kill guys like us. I probably shouldn’t enjoy the Whedonverse as much as I do.

  We hopped the fence and followed the trail of Indian cuisine into a patch of woods separating the school from the neighborhood where Marjorie lived. Our vamp night vision is equal to any human’s day sight. Unfortunately, our trail navigation skills were piss-poor. We went stumbling through the woods like a pair of drunken rhinos.

  After about ten minutes, Greg held up one hand. Since I was looking at my feet and not at his hand, I walked into his back. Laid him out like a pin at the bowling alley.

  “Dammit, Jimmy, would you watch where you’re going?” He picked himself up off the ground and brushed twigs and leaves off his knees.

  “I was watching where I was going, but I wasn’t watching where you were stopping. So why are we stopping?” I helped him up, figuring it was the least I could do.

  “I heard something. It sounded like someone trying to be stealthy in the woods.”

  “So it sounded nothing like us?”

  “Not a thing like us. Now shut up and let me try to hear it again.”

  We heard the exact opposite of someone trying to be stealthy—several loud gunshots came from about a hundred yards in front of us. Greg and I looked at each other and then bolted toward the sound.

  That’s either brave or stupid for most people, but we aren’t people and can’t be killed by bullets, unless they manage to completely destroy our hearts or sever our heads. Since those kinds of bullets are pretty rare, running toward the sound of gunshots is generally worse for those doing the shooting than for us.

  We hauled ass through the woods, managing to only trip on two or three exposed tree roots in the process, then drew up short at the edge of a clearing. Detective Law was in the clearing, apparently the source of the shots. I say “apparently” because she was no longer holding her gun, and from the looks of her, barely holding on to consciousness. She was lying on the ground in a circle of little girls. None of them looked older than nine, and they were beating the crap out of her.

  You didn’t have to be the sharpest knife in the drawer to figure out pretty quickly that these were not ordinary little girls. Even the village idiot would have guessed something was amiss when one of them picked Law up and threw her across the clearing at a huge tree. I nodded to Greg, and he jumped over to intercept the flying detective before her head became one with the splinters.

  I stepped into the clearing, and tried to buy some time with my wits and humor. God only knew how that was going to go. If I was ever going to be universally funny, it was time for the comedy gene to kick into high gear.

  “Now, girls, I don’t like curfew any more than you do, but that’s no reason to beat up a cop,” I said, leaning against a pine tree in what I thought was a jaunty fashion. I felt far less jaunty when a bunch of little girls, all sporting glowing eyes à la Children of the Corn, turned to me and started walking in my direction.

  I thought for a second about what it had taken to subdue the last one of these possessed super-brats and decided discretion was the better part of valor. I waited until the first couple of them were close enough to almost reach me, and then I jumped straight up into the tree. I cleared a good fifteen feet and swung up onto a branch, looking down to see the girls surrounding the base of the tree like little pigtailed bloodhounds.

  “Greg, you got any brilliant ideas? Now would be the time to send ‘em my way!” I yelled across the clearing.

  “I was thinking ‘run like hell’ sounds like a plan,” he shouted back.

  “I don’t think that is an option, gentlemen.” The woman’s voice came out of the darkness on the edge of the clearing. A middle-aged woman with her hair in a bun stepped into the circle of trees and said, “Come to me, my children.”

  The little girls with the creepy eyes formed a double rank in front of the woman and stood there, so silent that I couldn’t tell if they were breathing, even with my heightened senses.

  “Okay, lady. We don’t have any quarrel with you. Let the kids go and we can all be on our merry way.” I tried to hold my voice steady, and really hoped that my coat had enough drape in it to hide the fact that my kn
ees were shaking to a marimba beat. Greg looked up at me from across the clearing and mouthed something at me, but even if I had been able to read lips, he was too far away for me to understand what he wanted.

  Any hope of getting out of the woods without a serious fight, and probably a serious beating, went out the window when the bun-head opened her mouth again. “I don’t think you’re going anywhere, vampire. You got lucky the last time we met, but I don’t see any automobiles around for you to hit me with tonight.”

  Crap. Just crap. In my experience anyone who felt comfortable delivering a monologue before the punching started was strong enough to wreck my day. Plus the middle-aged woman was clearly possessed by the demon that had gotten us into this mess in the first place.

  I took stock of the situation from my elevated vantage point in the tree. I was facing a bunch of possessed little girls and what looked like one really pissed-off cafeteria lady. Greg was trying to help Detective Law to her feet, and I had no random automobiles to throw at the rug rats from hell.

  I decided to try and talk my way out of trouble. It used to work with principals, so why not crazed cafeteria-lady demons? “What’s the plan? You’ve gotten one step closer to your quota tonight, and then what? You turn in the box tops for an iPod?”

  “Fool!” shouted the woman. “Do you have any idea the forces you are tampering with?”

  “None whatsoever. Why don’t you enlighten me.” The longer I kept her talking, the better the chances Greg would think of something brilliant. I hoped. Boy, did I ever hope. I also hoped that this curry-scented psycho had seen all the same movies I had and knew her role was to provide a soliloquy on her plans and motives, giving me enough time to avoid being killed.

  “Foolish vampire, the world as you know it is coming to an end. The reign of mankind is over. When I complete my ritual and bring my father forth, all will kneel before the Dark Lord, and Belial shall be favored among all the Host!”

  I had no idea what the “Host” was, and the very sound of “Dark Lord” made me more than a little uncomfortable. And she was yelling. In my experience, supernatural bad guys yell right before they hit you very hard, or at least try to kill you in some unpleasant fashion. I thought I’d pre-empt her hitting me and take the fight to the bun-head.