Hard Day's Knight (8 page)

“Son, don’t bullshit a bullshitter. I’m in sales, and I can smell BS a mile away, and let me tell you, what you’re spreading will make the roses grow but it won’t help bring my little girl back. Now I just want to tell you one thing – whatever you want to write about me, go ahead. I’m not the world’s best dad, no matter what my coffee mug says, but you write one word about my little girl and I will absolutely destroy you.” He leaned forward for emphasis and almost fell out of his chair.

Usually I don’t react well to being threatened by anything lower than me on the food chain, but he was such a sad old man that I couldn’t help but feel a little sorry for him. I just said “Yes, sir. I will keep that in mind,” and headed out the front door. I stood on their porch for a few minutes trying to decide where to go, and finally just started walking in the direction that felt right.

I’ll admit that I’m not even the least bit psychic, but the subconscious mind is usually the smarter part of me, so I wasn’t really surprised when I ended up at Lauren’s school. It only made sense to go to the last place she was seen and try to pick up any bad vibes, or smells, or even maybe a clue. Ballantyne Elementary School looked like the typical all-American 21st-century school, a sprawling brick building with a cute little portico in front for parents to deposit their over-privileged spawn under so the little snot factories didn’t get a drop of rain on their little heads. Yeah, I might have a little class prejudice going on.

I poked around the campus for about half an hour or so, trying to see anything out of the ordinary and failing spectacularly. I don’t have any kind of special magic-detecting sense, and there weren’t any huge pentagrams drawn on the roof of the building or anything like that. I don’t really know what I was looking for, but I found a whole pile of nothing and was getting ready to head back to the main road and see about finding a cab or unsuspecting solo driver when inspiration struck.

I whipped out the new phone Greg had given me and dialed him up. He answered after the second ring. “Hey, come get me, bro.”

“Where are you?”

“Ballantyne Elementary, down south.”

“What are you doing, looking for a date?”

“Classy. Just come get me, I’ll explain on the way home.”

“Alright. It’ll take me like half an hour to get there, so sit tight.”

“Will do.” I hung up the phone and sat on the roof of the portico to wait. About twenty minutes passed before headlights turned into the drive. I stood up on the roof and started to wave when I realized that the headlights didn’t belong to Greg’s car, or to mine. I dropped flat to the roof as the police cruiser pulled into the drive and parked in front of the school.

Great, I thought to myself. I pick the one school in the district with enough money for motion sensors on the roof. I laid there as still as I could while the cop got out of the cruiser and did a lap around the building, shining his flashlight into the windows and generally looking like a cop doing a routine patrol. I grabbed my phone and shot Greg a quick “stay away, cops are here” text before switching the phone to silent and returning it to my pocket.

After two laps the cop got back in his car and just sat there. He left the dome light off, but I could see him fingering a picture in his sun visor. He sat there for a long few minutes before driving off. I texted Greg, and he picked me up a couple minutes later.

“Alright,” he said. “Tell me again why I had to drive all the way out here to get your sorry butt.”

“Because there aren’t any buses to Ballantyne at two in the morning and I didn’t want to steal any more cars this week.”

“Fair enough. Hey! What do you mean steal
any more
cars? I thought we agreed that we were the good guys?”

“Dude, stealing a car and giving it back doesn’t make me a bad guy. And I did give it back.” I was really hoping he would just drop it. He didn’t.

“And what about the driver? And don’t bother lying, you know you suck at it.” He’s right, too. I can’t lie worth a crap. Even being immortal and bloodless doesn’t mean I can lie looking my best friend in the face.

“I left him asleep in the back seat behind a biker bar on Central Avenue. He might have felt a little out of place when he woke up, but he’d be safe.” Silently urging him to drop it, he continued to ignore my desires and kept hammering at me.

“Asleep? Or drained?” He wouldn’t look at me, so I could tell he was really pissed.

“Asleep. I didn’t drain him.” And I didn’t. I drank a little, but I didn’t drain him. I wasn’t lying. I wasn’t going to tell him the whole truth unless he pulled it out of me with a wrecker, but I wasn’t going to lie, either.

“But you did feed, didn’t you? Don’t even answer. I can see it in your face. You look healthier than you have in years, so I know you fed on him.” I didn’t know what he was talking about, so I flipped down the sun visor on my side and checked myself out in the mirror.

He was right; I looked
good
. Well, good for me, anyway. I still had an unruly shock of brown hair hanging in my eyes, which were a little too close together and split by a pointy nose that had freckles spread all along its not-inconsiderable length. But I was a lot less pale than I had been when I woke up that night, and my eyes no longer had the pale, lifeless look that I’d come to equate with my reflection. And yes, I have a reflection. The mirror thing is as ridiculous as the garlic thing, and makes no sense to me at all.

“Okay, look, I did feed on the guy, but I didn’t drain him, and I didn’t really even drink that much. But that’s not why I look like this. That was at Phil’s.” I wasn’t sure I wanted to tell him about Lilith, and even if I did, I wasn’t sure how. I mean, he got bent out of shape about me feeding on a human, which is kinda the point of being a vampire. I figured he’d really flip out if I told him I’d fed on an immortal hottie.

“What happened at Phil’s?” He still wasn’t looking at me, which meant I was still in trouble. I swear, sometimes this partnership is like being married. We fight all the time and neither one of us is getting laid.

“There was someone there that Phil offered for me to feed from. He made it clear that it would be viewed as a serious breach of protocol for me to decline.”

“Since when do we care about demonic protocol?”

“Technically, Phil’s a fallen angel, which is different from a demon somehow. I think.”

“Whatever. So who did you drink from this time?” Wow, he was going heavy with the guilt trip. He was making it sound like I just went around drinking from people willy-nilly all the time. And I quit doing that years ago after I got a really embarrassing rash. You can get all sorts of things from bad blood, and some of them take a while for even vampire metabolism to get rid of.

“Her name was Lilith. The light’s green.” I really wanted him paying attention to the road and not to the name of my new acquaintance. After all, we’ve read the same comic books, so if I knew Lilith, I was pretty sure he would. And judging by the fact that he pulled into a Burger King parking lot and shut off the car, he recognized the name right off the bat.

“
Lilith?
Like Adam’s first wife Lilith? Like the original feminist Lilith? Lilith who was condemned to walk the earth forever spreading lust through the souls of all she touches but unable to ever feel true love?” Okay, maybe he’d read way more comic books than I had, because all that lust stuff was new to me.

“I guess.” I kinda sank down as far as the car seat would let me while Greg fumed. For all we’re the same age, he has a knack for making me feel like a stupid teenager all over again.

“Well?” He asked after he took a few deep breaths and counted to twenty. In four languages.

“Well what?” I thought I was maybe going to get out of this relatively unscathed. Four languages wasn’t too bad. Greg was fluent in seven, so anything under five meant he was only moderately pissed.

“Was it good?” There was a little longing in his voice, and I had hope that he might just admit that he missed the taste of live blood.

“Dude, you have no idea. It made me tingle in places I’d forgotten I had places. I saw colors that I don’t even have names for. I felt like I could run a marathon at noon in Arizona and not get the least bit crispy. It was amazing!” I could have gone on describing the feeling of feeding on Lilith, but the look on Greg’s face stopped me. He was scared. “What’s wrong?”

“Listen to me, and listen very carefully. You can never feed from her again. No matter what, no matter who it insults. Legend has it that her kiss, her very touch is so addictive that priests have burned their Bibles just for a drop of her sweat. You have to stay away from her, or she could take you over completely. And a vampire under the control of a creature like Lilith is not a pretty picture.”

He was right. I didn’t use much of my vamp powers in everynight life, but if Lilith was bad juju like Greg thought then she could wreak some serious havoc if I fell under her control. And Greg was by far the better judge of character between the two of us, so I trusted his opinion. “Alright, I’ll stay clear of her. You know how I hate going to Phil’s anyway. Let’s get out of here before some cop rolls up and decides we’re making out in the BK parking lot.” We didn’t say much on the way home, but Greg kept tossing me worried glances when he thought I wasn’t looking.

“So, what’s the plan?” Greg asked when we got back into our apartment.

“I’m still working on that.” I admitted, flopping down onto the couch and grabbing the Xbox controller. “Madden?” I asked as I tossed him the other controller.

“Sure. I always think better with a little break now and then.” So I proceeded to kick his virtual butt in the football video game for an hour or so while I let my mind percolate on everything I’d found out over the past couple of nights. After the third straight flogging, Greg didn’t want to play anymore, so he headed over to the computer.

“Really, dude? I thought we cancelled World of Warcraft.” I was just giving him a hard time, but sometimes I did it just because it was easy.

“Bite me. I’m checking email.”

“No thanks, I’ve had my fill of supernatural Scooby Snacks tonight.” He flipped me off, then started to wave me over to the desk.

“Come here, dude. You gotta see this!” He was actually bouncing up and down in his chair. I thought we’d broken him of that habit in high school, but obviously not. I leaned over the back of his chair, as much to rescue the furniture from the shock load as anything else.

“What is it, bro?”

“I emailed the guys about the kidnappings to see what they knew, and they’ve got all the police reports!”

Oh. Crap. “Really? You emailed the Dork Brigade about this case?”

“Man, don’t call them that. They’re good guys. And Jason hacked into the police database and got us the police reports. So they’re useful, too.”

“And how many free comic books did you get for letting them help?” When he wouldn’t look at me, I knew I’d hit home. My partner – the closet Spider-Man junkie.

“The guys” were a trio of losers that worked in the biggest comic shop in town. They were understandably all over Greg for information on his “ongoing cases” whenever he went in to grab his subscriptions. Every once in a while we used them for daytime legwork or computer help when it was something we couldn’t get Dad to do or if the computing was out of Greg’s league. They were occasionally useful, but I always had a hard time balancing their annoying tics against the value of their assistance.

“Do you want the reports or not?” I did, of course, so we spent the next twenty minutes printing a buttload of reports and then the rest of the night reading them. People think being a private detective is all fast cars and loose women, but it’s mostly divorce photos (not even the hot ones) and paperwork. Of course, people think being a vampire is all seductive glances and string quartets, and they never think about blood-in-a-bag and
SPF
ten million.

There were ten files, and the girl we’d exorcised the night was slated to be number eleven, so we added our notes on her and Tommy into the mix and tried to see what patterns emerged. After three hours of taking apart class schedules, church attendance, club memberships and even school bus routes, I was losing my patience.

“There’s nothing here!” I lay on my back in the floor of the apartment, surrounded by paper. It looked like I’d been mugged by a shedding yeti, and we had no more ideas than when we started. “What time is it?” I asked Greg.

“Seven.” He mumbled, going over attendance records for the fifth victim.

“I’m going to bed. It’s been a long night.” I stretched as I stood up and my thighs threatened to revolt. Vampire or not, you sit cross-legged on the floor for a few hours and your butt falls asleep. I staggered off to my bedroom and crashed for a few hours while Greg kept going. He’s always been better at homework than me, anyway.

It wasn’t a very restful sleep, with visions of scared children running from sexy fallen angels dancing through my head while I tried to grab a few hours’ rest. We do sleep, and we dream, and we don’t “die” every morning at sunrise. We can sense the sunrise, it’s kinda like our bodies’ way of warning us not to go outside for fear of becoming a pile of ash, but I’ve been known to pull an all-nighter (or in my case an all-dayer, I guess) when I needed to. I got about six hours of fitful sleep and staggered out to the den to find Greg facedown in the scattered mass of case files.

I stepped over him as quietly as I could, opened the fridge and grabbed a bottle of orange juice. Since my roomie was asleep I didn’t bother getting a glass, just sat on the couch in my boxers and drank straight from the plastic jug. We can drink, too, anything we want. No food, though. The digestive system stops working except for a liquid diet right after we wake up. So I guess that answers Tommy’s question about vampire poop. We don’t get any nutrients out of anything we drink except blood, but alcohol still works, only to a lesser degree. And if you play your cards right, you can pee in some spectacular colors, because what comes in, goes right back out again. You don’t want to know how we found this out, but let it suffice to say that we were young and learning about our new abilities, and leave it at that.