Hard Day's Knight (3 page)

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.

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.

“Grab Tommy. I stashed him on a roof.” I yelled to Greg.

“Where are you going with her?” He yelled back. He was weaving a little back and forth, but he could stand, at least.

“Where else? I gotta take her to Dad’s.” And I tossed the girl over my shoulder like a rolled-up carpet and took off toward the only place that was safe to interrogate her – St. Patrick’s.

I carried the girl/witch/thing over my shoulder toward St. Patrick’s Church, hoping by all I had ever believed in that Dad could contain her. “Dad” is Michael Maloney, the priest at St. Patrick’s, and he’s one of the best friends a vampire could have. He’s also an old friend, the only person from before that Greg and I ever associate with. He’s been there for us for a long time, and I really hoped that he had enough juice with the Big Guy Upstairs to bind this whatever-she-was long enough to get some answers.

I couldn’t just go in through the front door, that whole holy ground thing is pretty true. But there’s a corner of the cemetery that sits on unsanctified soil, because the church decided during the Great Depression that it needed a place to bury suicides within the fence, so the church could keep the funeral revenue. But Catholic doctrine wouldn’t allow someone who took their own life to be buried on hallowed ground, so they bought the property next door, knocked down the non-sanctified house that was there, fenced in the lot and expanded the graveyard. It’s really handy to have a place to meet that no one would ever think to look for us, and Greg and I keep a room of sorts in one of the crypts for emergencies. And this was shaping up to be a doozy of an emergency.

I called Dad on my cell when I was close, and he met me at the crypt with a lantern and a battered leather bag. I guessed it was his exorcism tool kit, and gave it a wide berth. Mike’s never tried to douse us with holy water or anything else, but crosses, true believers and vampires don’t mix.

“Jimmy, my son, what have you gotten yourself into?” Mike asked as he held the door for me. I dropped my little care package on the floor of the crypt and Mike stood there gaping at the hog-tied teenager in front of him.

“Don’t call me your son,
Dad
. And I don’t really know what I’ve gotten into. That’s what I’ve got you for. This little chicklet is way more than she seems. She kicked the crap out of me and Greg both, and if I hadn’t dropped a minivan on her head she probably would have killed Greg.” That was the moment that my body decided to let all the bruises and exertion catch up with me, and I slid down to sit on the floor of the crypt.

“I don’t suppose you’ve got anything to eat in that bag?” I eyed his satchel hopefully.

Mike shook his head. “Sorry, my – um – Jimmy. I don’t exactly keep the red in with the Host.”

“It’s alright. I’ll go out for a snack later. For now, we need to find out what’s gotten into this kid. Literally.”

Mike’s eyes got wide, and he actually inched closer to his bag. “You think she may be possessed?”

“Not my field. But I know she’s way stronger than she should be, and she sensed us as vamps from way farther away than even a bloodhound could have.”

“Hmmm. Well, extra-dimensional beings would certainly be able to sense the presence of other creatures of their ilk, and demons are reputed to have incredible strength.”

“Hey! Go easy on the ilk, old buddy. Remember, me and my ilk used to slip you
Playboys
in middle school.”

“No offense meant, James. It’s just a term. Now, let me get a closer look at her.” He knelt on the floor beside the girl, and only my speed allowed me to grab his shoulders and pull him back intact. The girl lunged at his face, trying for all the world to eat his nose. I yanked him out of the way, and whatever she was laughed. And it was the kind of laugh that makes places inside you go very, very cold.

“Come closer, priest. Give us a little kiss,” it mocked. Mike grabbed a crucifix from his bag, and thrust it at the girl-thing. It hissed and tried to roll away, but I kinda lost sight of things for a minute there. Probably because I was trying to put a sarcophagus between myself and the holy symbol. Mike was the truest type of true believer, and the cross in his hands gave me a monster of a migraine, and from the looks of things whatever was inside the girl liked it even less than I did.

“In the name of God the Father and Jesus Christ his Son on Earth I command you to leave this girl!” When I opened my eyes again, peeking carefully over the big stone coffin I was hiding behind, Mike was standing over the girl, cross in his left hand and a Bible in his right. The cross was glowing with an ethereal light, and it looked like something was floating around the girl. It was like a cloud of glowing red gnats, buzzing and angry, was coalescing around her head. Then I heard the voice again, and not for the first time that night, I got really worried.

“Foolish priest! Do you think that your trappings of faith can save you?” The voice seemed even freakier now that it was coming from the cloud instead of the girl. The sound was all around us, swirling in and out of the air like an angry wind. “I see inside your soul, priest! I see your darkest thoughts, your blackest fears, and you are
not
holy!”

“I am a servant of the Lord God Almighty and by his grace I am sanctified. You are a beast of Hell and I command you to leave this girl!” Mike raised his Bible over his head and pointed the cross at the girl like a conductor in Beethoven’s Fifth.

The thing laughed, and I swear the girl’s eyes glowed red, like something out of a bad horror movie. “I serve a power older and stronger than your pitiful little carpenter. Your little book means nothing to me, and you cannot command one with power such as mine!” With its words, Mike’s Bible burst into flames, and he threw the book at the girl.

Mike switched into Latin, and since I’m not old enough and certainly not religious enough to have much of a grasp on dead languages, I had no idea what he was saying. But after a couple of seconds of chanting, the cloud-thing screamed in rage and pain, and then flew out at Mike like a comic-book bee colony, heading straight for his hand. The crucifix flared into blinding light, first white, then a deep crimson red.

I heard the thing laugh again, and then through that awful cackling laughter, I heard Mike begin to scream. There was one last flash of red light, and a wave of force blew out from Mike and the girl. I felt it in my chest like a hurricane; it picked me up and flung me limp into the far wall of the crypt. The last thing I heard before I blacked out was that laugh. And Mike screaming.

When I woke up I was alone in the crypt. There was a puddle of melted silver on the floor where I last remembered Mike standing, and the seatbelts I had tied the girl with were lying on a pile in a corner. They’d been cut neatly, not torn, but that was all the info I could glean from my surroundings. I went to the door and eased it open just a crack to see the bright sunlight begin streaming into the crypt from the cemetery.

Crap
, I thought.
Guess I’m stuck here for a while, at least.

The whole thing about sunlight is real, too. We don’t burst into flames immediately, but it doesn’t take long for one of us to be reduced to a pile of charcoal briquettes if we come into contact with direct sunlight. And of course my best-case scenario was that Mike had recovered enough to go into the church, where I am certainly
vampire non grata
, so that wasn’t much better. I took a quick inventory and saw that my cell phone had been crushed at some point in the fight, so I settled down to wait for nightfall.

After a ridiculously boring day of staring at a sunbeam, I felt more than saw the sun finally dip below the horizon, and I headed out into the cemetery. Mike was on his way out of the church and hurried across the sanctified part of the graveyard to meet me.

“Where have you been, dude? I’ve been stuck in there worried sick all day!” I started to lay into him pretty solid, but then I got a good look at my old friend. He looked his age for probably the first time ever. He had a bandage on his forehead that looked fresh, and his left hand was wrapped heavily all the way from the elbow to the fingers. “Jesus Christ, man, how bad did she get you?”

“Pretty badly, I’m afraid. Not all of us are blessed with eternal youth, James. I just recently returned from the hospital with our young guest. She’s terribly shaken up and I only got her to sleep in the parish house a few moments ago.” He took my elbow and led me further from the church, as though there was someone in there he didn’t want to take note of our little chat.

“What? She’s in the church?” I was baffled. I would have bet the farm that she was way less welcome on holy ground than me. “And have you heard from Greg? My phone got…”

“Trashed. Again. Here.” Greg tossed me a replacement phone as he came out from behind a tree. I looked him up and down, but he didn’t seem to be any the worse for wear after getting pummeled last night. As if in answer to my unspoken question, Greg went on. “I’m fine. I had a snack before I went to bed last night. Tommy’s arm is a clean break, but she got both the bones so it’s gonna be useless for a month or so. They kept him at the hospital for observation; I talked to him while I was on my way over here.”

I put the phone in my front pocket this time, since my back pocket didn’t seem to be very good for protecting them. “So what was that you said about the girl being in the church, Mike? I figured her for a serious bad guy, given what she did to all of us last night.”

“What was residing in the girl was in fact, a very serious bad guy, but the girl herself was guilty of nothing more than curiosity and a desire for a little payback on the kids at school who teased her. I think we can all relate to those sentiments, can’t we?” He raised an eyebrow at Greg and me, and we had the good grace to look sheepish. I’m not sure when my old friend had developed the juice to get me to be embarrassed at my youthful indiscretions, but he certainly had it now. Maybe it came with the first grey hairs. I’d never know.