Hard Day's Knight (Black Knight Chronicles)

by John G. Hartness

  “We are.” Greg interrupted. I shot him a look that said shut up, doofus and gestured for Tommy to continue.

  “But it’s not a mystery, I just can’t stop it.” He finished.

  “Can’t stop what, exactly.” Greg reached into the top of his right boot and pulled out a blood pack. “Snack?” he asked me.

  “What flavor?” I replied.

  “O-positive. I didn’t know what you’d be in the mood for, what with the whole kidnapping thing.” He tossed me the bag and I ripped it open. As I began to bring the bag to my mouth I noticed Tommy looking even paler than he’d started as, which was no mean feat.

  “What’s wrong, kid? Haven’t you ever seen one of us eat?” I asked as I turned the bag up and started to drink. Nice, this one was fresh, no more than a couple of weeks old, and while the bag smelled faintly of Greg’s socks, being in his boot had kept the blood warm. It was smooth, obviously a young donor, without much in the way of contaminants, and the snack went a long way toward healing the burns the silver necklaces had made on my wrists and ankles.

  “No, I haven’t.” Tommy said in a very small voice. I finished the bag of blood and looked over at him. He looked like what he was, a very scared kid who had gotten way in over his head.

  “Well this is a lot cleaner than the old-fashioned way, let me tell you.” Greg piped up. He’d finished off a blood bag of his own and I wondered for a minute what flavor his had been. Each blood type had a unique taste, and different donors had their unique qualities, too. Finding a good batch in a blood bank was kinda like stumbling on a really expensive bottle of Bordeaux at Sam’s Club.

  Tommy looked a little sick, but he swallowed gamely and went back to his story, very careful not to look at either of us. “There’s a witch that I pissed off, and now she wants to kill me and my whole family. So all I could think of was to get you to turn me into a vampire so that I could kill her before she got to my family.”

  “Wow,” I said. “That’s one I haven’t heard before. Now how exactly did you find a real witch, and what did you do to make her so angry that you decided it was worth becoming a vampire to kill her before she killed you and everybody you care about?”

  “And more importantly, how did you find out about Jimmy and figure out enough about us to nab him?” Greg hopped off the car trunk and was beside the kid’s chair before he could even think about breathing. “Oh yeah, and we can smell it on you if you lie.” That’s not exactly true. We can smell fear, and usually people smell a little different when they’re lying, but this guy was so terrified already that I didn’t think it would make a difference. But he didn’t have to know that.

  “Well it all started with a girl,” he began. Doesn’t it always start with a girl?

  Chapter 3

  “She was just this weirdo little kid, all goth and stuff…” Tommy began, but Greg (of course) had to interrupt him.

  “Wait a minute. I thought goth went out in 1989?” He asked.

  “I wouldn’t know, I wasn’t born then. I just know she wore a lot of black, too much eyeliner, always had on t-shirts with weird bands on them, you know, a freak.” Tommy answered. He didn’t notice that Greg wasn’t really listening, just standing there shaking his head.

  “I don’t know, Jimmy-boy. I just don’t know what’s worse. The fact that you got captured by a human, or the fact that you got captured by a human child.” Greg looked at me disapprovingly.

  “Hey!” Tommy exclaimed. “I’m eighteen, you know. I’m no kid. After all, how old are you guys? You can’t be more than a couple years older than me.”

  “None of your business… I started, just as Greg said “Thirty-five.”

  “Huh?” Tommy looked back and forth between the two of us, confused.

  “Remember, kid? Vampires? Creatures of the night? We don’t age, moron. We were turned in 1996, and we were both twenty-two then. So yeah, we’re older than we look.” Greg explained, reclaiming his perch on the trunk of the car.

  “Except we’re dead.” I said, pulling over a stack of pallets and taking a seat. This kid looked like the long-winded type, and I wasn’t feeling my best from being bound with silver, so I decided I’d rather not stand for his whole monologue. “Anyway, you were saying?”

  “Uh…yeah. Anyway, she was this weird middle school kid and stuff and me and my buddies, well…we kinda gave her some crap from time to time. Nothing big, just…”

  “Just making her life a living hell for the amusement of you and your idiot friends?” Greg asked, a grim look on his face. Being trapped in an overweight body for eternity will give you sympathy to people who have body image issues.

  “Um…yeah, I guess you could probably say that. But anyway, it’s a couple weeks ago and we’re just messing with her, throwing her book bag around, popping her training bra and stuff, when this funky book falls out. It’s all leather-bound, and soft, like a journal or something, and has writing on the cover like I’ve never seen before. So I grab it, and make to throw it to my buddy Jamie, and she goes nuts on me. She jumps on my back, pulling my hair and hitting me and stuff. She’s never done anything like this, so I kinda shove her a little bit, not really even that hard, and she falls right on her butt in this big mud puddle, and the book maybe falls in the mud with her, and then she looks at me, and she curses me.” Tommy even had the decency to look a little ashamed of his behavior, or maybe just ashamed to have to own up to it to a couple of guys who were old enough to be his dad.

  “You mean, she called you a jerk, or an asshole, or something like that?” Greg asked. “Because, if you ask me, those curses were pretty well-deserved.”

  “Nah, man, nothing like that,” Tommy replied. “She really cursed me. She looked up at me and said something like ‘By All the Dead, I Curse Thee. By All Hallow’s Eve shall thee and all thy kin die a bloody death.’ And when she said it, I swear her eyes glowed, man. And I felt something like a chill run through me, and I knew she was for real. That’s when I knew I had to get some serious firepower.” Tommy came to stand right in front of me and I could see the kid was way more scared of a witch in the future than two vampires in the present – and we could be pretty scary when we needed to. “So will you help me?”

  “I don’t know, kid. I don’t usually go out of my way to defend bullies and kidnappers from justice.” Greg said from the trunk. “Seems to me you might deserve everything you’re gonna get in, oh what’s today? Yeah, three days.”

  “I might, man, but my kid sister doesn’t!” Tommy went over and grabbed Greg by the shoulders. “You’ve gotta help her, even if you don’t help me. I mean, she’s just a little kid; she doesn’t deserve anything bad happening to her. If I get punished, that’s fine. I screwed with the witch; I deserve to get turned into a frog or whatever. But Amy’s only seven; she doesn’t deserve to die just because I was a jerk.” He was almost in hysterics, and I didn’t want to see what would happen if he started crying and got snot all over Greg’s costume. Lycra is a great fabric, but it doesn’t exactly shed mucus all that well. I wish I didn’t know that on so many levels.

  I knew Greg was in as soon as Tommy mentioned a kid sister. He’s a sucker for cases with little kids. It goes back to his baby sister, Sarah. That’s a long story, and there’s no happy ending, either. I was in as soon as he said, “witch” just because I’d never met a real one before, and I’m a sucker for cases with things I’ve never seen before.

  Chapter 4

  So the next night we were hanging out on Tommy’s front porch waiting for him to finish dinner and come out and play with the big boys. Or, more to the point, we were sitting on the roof of his porch so as not to scare his parents. I had to be careful to keep my feet from dangling off, and Greg had to be careful not to stray too far from structural support members. I’m not sure what would have happened if he’d fallen through the roof, what with the rules about being invited in and all. I don’t know if he wouldn’t have been able to fall into the room, which would be good; or if he would have
fallen in and burst into flames, which would have been bad. We decided not to take too many chances, so he kept to the more solid parts of the roof.

  It was about eight when the family fun time broke up and our client made his way outside to meet us. He muttered some unintelligible collage of “out” and “nowhere” and “nobody” in response to his mother’s questions, but eventually he stood on the sidewalk in front of his house looking around.

  “Ummm…guys?” We let him stand there for a minute feeling nervous, and maybe a little silly, before we jumped down off the roof to flank him. At least I did. Greg, with his typical grace, managed to land half on the sidewalk, half in dog poop.

  “Awww, man! Do you know how hard it is to get dog crap out of Doc Martens?” he whined.

  “Bro, I didn’t know they still made Doc Martens.”

  “Bite me.”

  “No thanks, pal. You went stale before the turn of the century.” He flipped me off, and we focused on the task at hand. We all started walking and I went over the plan we’d devised the night before.

  “Alright, Tommy,” I began, “you’re going to show us where this witch lives and we’re going to see if we can find anything out about her. If she’s really a witch, we should be able to convince her to reverse the curse before anything bad happens to your family.”

  “How are you going to do that? You never said how you’re going to convince her.” Tommy was a nice kid, but a little whiny. I didn’t need whiny clients. I had a partner for that.

  “We can be pretty persuasive when we want to be,” was all I said.

  “Remember? Creatures of the night? All that kind of nastiness?” Greg chimed in, having caught up with us after cleaning his boots. I’d talked him out of the spandex uniform for tonight, but he still had on the boots and utility belt. I had no desire to know what he carried in that thing.

  We walked along in silence for a while. At least, Greg and I walked in silence. Tommy, on the other hand, decided to use this face time with the dark denizens of the night (his words, not mine) to satisfy his curiosity about some of the finer points of vampirism.

  Block 1: “Hey guys, is it true that you can’t, you know, get it up unless you’ve fed recently? I mean, it makes sense, it is a blood flow thing.” Cue sound effect of crickets chirping. The last thing I’m gonna discuss with a teenage wannabe is my erectile function. Or otherwise.

  Block 2: “Hey, um, maybe this is too personal, but are you guys like, dating I mean, I read somewhere that vampires are all, like bisexual and stuff. And you are always together.” This is not the origin issue; chump. Just because you pay the bill does not mean you get the personal answers. And, um, no.

  Block 3: “So, um, do vampires poop?” Ok, so maybe this is the last thing I’m gonna choose to discuss with a teenage wannabe.

  Thankfully, the witch only lived about four blocks from Tommy’s house, so we didn’t have to rip his throat out along the way. It didn’t look much like a haven for evil sorcery, more like a typical suburban ranch - nice wraparound porch, bike in the front yard, probably four bedrooms with one converted into an “office” where the dad surfed porn on the internet while the mom watched American Idol in the den. We scouted the outside of the house for a while making sure there wasn’t a doghouse or anything else that indicated serious bad fortune on our part.

  Dogs don’t like vampires. Cats usually just look at us funny, but they do that to humans, too. Dogs go absolutely nuts when they get near a vampire. They bark, howl, tend to pee all over the place, and depending on the size of the dog we’re talking about, either attack or run like hell. Of course it’s always the little yippy dogs that attack, and the big dogs with enough sense to run like hell. I’ve ripped apart my fair share of Chihuahuas in my day. After we made sure that the place was clear of pooches, we reconvened on the sidewalk in front of the house.

  “Ok Tommy, this is where you come in.” Greg instructed. The kid looked like he didn’t know whether to run home like he had a hellhound on his trail, or to charge in there and beat the little witch to death with a phonebook.

  He took a minute to screw up his courage, and looked over at Greg. “What do I have to do?”

  “You’ve got to convince her to come outside with you to talk.” Greg replied.

  “Why?”

  “Jesus, kid. Not everything you’ve read is true, but not all of it is wrong, either. We can’t go in without being invited. And if she’s got any kind of power at all, she’ll sense that we’re not exactly the mailman. So there’s no way in hell she’ll invite us in. So, go. Get to convincing.” Greg put one hand on Tommy’s shoulder and spun him towards the house. He put the other hand in the small of his back and propelled him toward the front door. I hopped up onto the roof of their porch so that I could get a closer sniff of what this chick was, if she was anything out of the ordinary.

  Tommy rang the doorbell, and a girl answered right away. I couldn’t see her, but I heard her clear as a bell. “I knew you’d be coming. You may not enter, and your friends may not enter, either. Your pitiful life is over, Thomas Harris, and nothing you say to me will change that.” Her voice didn’t sound right, like there was something bigger speaking behind her, and I could smell something that definitely wasn’t teenage girl floating around. I felt a surge of power, and hopped down off the roof just in time to see her try to slam the door in Tommy’s face. That’s when the kid did something I never figured he’d have the guts to do – he grabbed her. He reached inside and dragged her out onto the porch, slamming the door behind her.

  Once she was outside, I figured this would be simple – we’d grab her, haul her back to our cemetery, scare the crap out of her, and she’d be begging us to let her take it back and please Mr. Vampire don’t eat me I’m still a virgin quicker than you can say garlic mashed potatoes. But as soon as I stepped up onto the porch I saw that I was really, really wrong. And I got really, really worried.

  Chapter 5

  I got to the porch a little before Greg, and we both stopped cold at what we saw. The girl, who couldn’t have been more than fourteen and a hundred pounds soaking wet, had Tommy on his knees and had obviously broken his left arm. He wasn’t screaming, but it wasn’t for lack of trying. It had more to do with the fact that she had let go of his arm and was busy crushing his throat with one hand.

  I ran at her, and she flicked out her other fist almost faster than I could see, and certainly faster than I could dodge. She caught me square in the solar plexus and doubled me up with one ridiculous punch. Lucky for Tommy she only had two hands, because Greg came at her the same time I did and landed enough of a punch to knock her a step backwards, making her let go of Tommy’s throat before he died.

  “You should not interfere, vampire. There are forces at work beyond your understanding.” Again with the creepy voice thing. This chick would have irritated me if I hadn’t been so scared just then.

  “Well, we have interfered. So let’s talk about this like rational beings, shall we?” Greg’s always trying to talk his way out of fights. I think it goes back to being the fat kid in school. He couldn’t fight, so he tried to talk or joke his way out of getting his ass kicked. I don’t know that it’s ever worked in all the decades I’ve known him. This was no exception. The girl looked at him disdainfully, laughed, and lunged at him with more of that crazy speed. She started throwing kicks and punches that would make Jackie Chan look like Jackie Mason, and it took everything Greg had to dodge enough of them not to get crushed.

  I picked Tommy up over my shoulders and jumped him onto a neighboring roof. “Stay here, and stay quiet. I don’t need to explain how you got here to the fire department. I’ll come get you after we kick her ass.” I made to jump into the scrap, but he grabbed my leg.

  “What if you can’t beat her?” He asked through a mouthful of blood. I missed the part where she busted his mouth up, but that might also have happened when she dropped him on his face.

  “Then you don’t have to worry about paying our
bill.” I jumped off the roof, cleared the front yard in one hop, and joined the rumble, which had moved out into the street by this point. I didn’t like the number of porch lights that were flickering on, so I stopped throwing punches long enough to say “If you still want to stay incognito for more than the next five minutes or so, we might want to move this party somewhere more private.”

  “Or I could just kill you quickly,” the girl said, nailing me with and uppercut that sent me flying into the path of an oncoming minivan.

  “Or that,” I said as the van crashed into my back (or I crashed into its front, whichever way you want to look at it). Greg took a kick to the head that spun him completely around, and she grabbed his head like she was going to twist it completely off his body. That’s one of the only sure-fire ways to kill us, and when I saw what she had in mind, I found a lot more strength than I’d ever had before.

  I picked up that stupid little minivan, and slammed it into the freshman from hell with everything I had. Toys, glass, baby seats and a couple of yuppies spilled out onto the pavement, but the girl was finally down. Greg dragged the yuppies over to the sidewalk and dropped his Jedi mind trick on them about hitting a Great Dane while I used their seatbelts to tie the girl’s hands and feet.