Paint it Black: 4 (The Black Knight Chronicles) (4 page)

I mean, why would she want to be with a dorky dead guy who looks a decade or so her junior? And what would I do if we did really turn into something? I was having enough trouble dealing with Mike’s mortality, and close friend or not, I’d never been in love with him. And was I falling in love with Sabrina? I didn’t know what that was supposed to feel like for living people, much less corpses. A disarmingly witty corpse, but still no one that you could take home to mother.

I spent the better part of an hour driving myself crazy thinking until my door opened. I had just enough time to see a curvy female form in the doorway before something black and soft landed on my face. It smelled faintly of lavender and my laundry detergent as I pulled it off my face. “Close your eyes and roll over, fangboy.”

I did as she asked, and I felt the bed shift as Sabrina slid into bed behind me. She wrapped her arms around me and nuzzled up against my neck. I could feel every inch of her pressed against my back, from the smooth muscles of her thighs to the soft swells of her breasts. I froze for a minute, not really knowing how to react. This was something new for us, but I liked it a lot. She kissed me softly on the side of the neck and whispered, “It’s okay to breathe, I won’t run away.”

“I don’t have to breathe,” I replied, and felt her stiffen behind me. Sometimes Sabrina forgets the finer points of dating a vampire. Like the whole part about me being dead. I rolled over and took her in my arms, pulling her face to my chest and kissing her forehead. “Thanks,” I whispered.

“For what?”

“Reminding me what it feels like to be alive.” I kissed her forehead again and held her as we drifted off to sleep.

I DON’T KNOW how long we were asleep, but I was snatched out of a pleasant dream involving a pier at Myrtle Beach that I vaguely remember from my teens by the sound of tires squealing into our driveway. I jumped out of bed, startling Sabrina awake, and I was already out the door before she could have realized I’d moved. I ran down the stairs, taking them three at a time and, at the door, almost bowled right into Greg, who had come up the stairs from the basement almost as fast.

“What’s the deal?” I asked, jerking open the door to the coat closet and reaching inside for my twelve-gauge.

Greg didn’t stop as he ran past me into the kitchen. He yanked the dishwasher open and ducked his head inside. I cocked my head to one side as he came back with a pair of 9mm Glock 17s.

“What?” he asked. “We don’t eat off dishes. We drink blood out of bags and beer from the bottle. Might as well use the thing for a gun rack.”

I had no time and no argument, so I just took up a position in the hallway facing the door. The sun was up, but I was far enough back that direct rays wouldn’t hit me. All I had to worry about was a little discomfort from the brightness. Greg stationed himself to one side of the door where he’d be out of my field of fire but have a clean line on anything that could survive the double-ought buckshot loaded in my Mossberg. The first round was a beanbag round, just in case. But everything after that was a custom mix of silver and iron shot, designed to cut bad guys, dead or alive, in half at close range. I heard a third pistol cock and looked up to see a long expanse of leg stretching down the stairs. I followed the leg up to where Sabrina had her service weapon, a forty-caliber Smith & Wesson semiautomatic, at the ready.

Whoever was outside cleared the front porch steps in a single bound and threw open the door, bursting inside with inhuman speed. All we could see was a black-clad form, but it was an instantly recognizable form.

“Abby!” I yelped. “What the hell are you doing? The sun’s up! Are you friggin’ nuts?” I pushed past our new arrival to slam the door closed and drew the heavy curtain back over the window as Abby Lahey jumped from one foot to the other in the small foyer.

“OwowowowowowOOOOWWWWW!”
Abby yelled, plucking at her clothes like she was burning, which she probably was. She was clad head-to-toe in a clingy black material, like spandex, complete with a tight black ski mask and dark ski goggles. She started shedding clothes like mad, flinging fabric right and left until suddenly there was a gorgeous twenty-something blonde vampiress in our foyer wearing nothing but panties, a bra, and what looked like first-degree burns over the rest of her very curvy body.

“Shit that hurts!” Abby swore, pulling at her bra and underpants.

“Jimmy, give her your T-shirt,” Sabrina shouted down to me, and I obeyed without thinking. My T-shirt would hang down almost to Abby’s knees, but I peeled it off and threw it on over her head. Then Abby performed that magical contortionist’s trick that women do where they take their bra off without taking off their shirt. She skinned out of her panties, and sighed, her discomfort obviously reduced by having less clothing touching her body.

Greg scampered into the kitchen to put his pistols away, and came back with two bags of blood from the fridge. “Here, this will help with the burns,” he said, handing the blood to Abby. She greedily drank one of them down in an instant, then took almost a whole five seconds to drink the other one. She let out another deep sigh and started to relax. As the new blood hit her system, we could almost watch it supercharge her healing. The lobster skin tone she was sporting faded to a pale pink within a couple of minutes, then almost all the way to her natural color in a few more.

By the time Sabrina and I had gone upstairs, dressed, and come back down to the den, Abby was back to her normal super-pale complexion and had stopped swearing like a sailor. She’d even managed to put her underpants back on, or at least they weren’t lying in the foyer anymore, and from the less-than-ladylike way she was sitting curled up in an armchair, she was apparently wearing something under my T-shirt. If all the women in the house were going to keep wearing my shirts, I was going to have to do laundry more often.

“Would you like to explain what all that was about, now that bursting into flames is no longer imminent?” I asked, sitting on the couch. Sabrina curled up beside me, and I put my arm around her shoulders. Her hair smelled good, but I tried not to get distracted or dwell too much on how easily we had settled against each other. As if we were good at this relationship business.

“I thought if I wore non-porous synthetic materials that I might be okay with limited exposure to the sun. So I tried it.”

“Where did you get that idea?” I continued. She didn’t answer. I opened my mouth to press her, then caught her glance and turned my attention to my partner. Greg was making a valiant effort at sinking through his chair into the floor, but that’s a lot of mass to sink, and we don’t have that power, so he wasn’t getting anywhere. “Knightwood? What the hell did you do?”

“I didn’t do anything, bro! I promise! I might have mentioned a theory to Abby, but that’s really all it is—a theory. We’re nowhere close to human trials yet.”

“Human trials aren’t the issue. Humans don’t get flash-fried when they try to get a little tan. I’m more concerned with this
vampire
trial.” I glared at both of them.

“Greg didn’t have anything to do with this! I decided that it sounded like a good idea, so I gave it a shot! Don’t yell at him for what I did! And, anyway, what gives you the right to yell at anybody? You’re not my dad, so don’t try to act like it.” She got right up in my face and shoved me backward.

I decided to try a little diplomacy for a change. Diplomacy wasn’t my strong suit, but I didn’t feel like repairing the walls if Abby and I really decided to argue vamp-style. I spread my hands and put on my best “calm face.” “Abby, I don’t want to yell at anybody, but I don’t want you getting hurt. If you guys had just asked, I could have told you that this was what would happen. I tried it already.”

“Yeah?” Greg asked.

“Yeah, in 1998. It might work with a hazmat suit, or even with leather, I haven’t tried that. But even synthetic materials like spandex have to breathe. And they’re not treated to repel UV rays. Plus we don’t even know
why
sunlight hurts us. For all we know it could be some magical thing, and no matter what we do, we get crisped if we go outside during daylight hours. All I know is that the effect lessens over time, so after a decade or so you can get from the car to the house without dying. But in the first few years, everything you remember about Count Chocula is pretty much gospel.”

“Why couldn’t we just sparkle like the cool kids out West?” Abby moped, flopping down in her armchair and doing unsettling things with the hem of my T-shirt, which made only the most meager attempt at covering her long legs.

“Because we’re real, and we’re not that pretty,” I said with a grin.

“Speak for yourself, beanstalk. I’m a total babe.” I couldn’t disagree with her there. She was absolutely worthy of being a basic-cable vampire, even if Greg and I looked more like walk-ons.

“So . . . where you been?” I asked innocently, not really ready to start another fight but knowing that a discussion was needed. Sabrina, helpful as ever, made some noise about showering and working and got out of the line of fire as quickly as possible. Greg didn’t even speak, just bolted for the stairs, leaving me alone with Abby for our little “chat.”

She looked at the pair of them leaving then sighed and leaned back in her chair. “Where’s the camera crew?”

“Huh?”

“If this is an intervention, shouldn’t there be somebody taping it for later broadcast? I mean, this oughta be a ratings blockbuster—Vampire Intervention—When Bloodsuckers Go Bad or some crap like that. Go ahead, tell me how bad I am for eating takeout all the time. Tell me how it opens us up for exposure and makes everything more dangerous for everybody. Tell me how we’re the top of the food chain, but with great power comes great responsibility. Or are you going to quote Batman instead of Spider-Man this time?”

“Well, if you know everything I’m going to say, why should I bother?” I asked calmly. Maybe if I kept cool, this wouldn’t turn into another yelling match. We’d had those already, and nothing had changed. I figured giving the reasoned approach a shot might not be terrible.

“I don’t know, Jimmy. Why should you bother? What does it matter that I hunt? It’s what we’re supposed to do! We drink blood. Humans make blood. Obviously they exist to feed us, right? And I know what I’m doing.” She started to tick off points on her fingers. “I never drink from the same human twice. I never hunt in the same place twice in a week. I never go to the same place looking the same. I always mojo the snack into going home and sleeping it off. I always make them think they hooked up with a chick at the bar who looks nothing like me. Come on man, I’m careful.”

“Careful isn’t what it’s all about, Abby. I mean, look, I’m not the poster boy for abstinence here. I enjoy the occasional Meal on Wheels too, but
every
night is too risky. That’s why we cut our blood deal with Bobby. It’s why Greg is doing IT work for the Master of the City to get access to his blood wine cellar. So we don’t have to be out there every single night. Every time we take a victim, it exponentially increases the chance of someone catching on to us. So we have to be judicious about things, and only eat takeout when we have to.”

“But it’s so
good
.” She writhed a little her chair, and the hem of the T-shirt inched up to show off even more distracting young leg.

Worse, I had no argument for her.

“I know. You’re right. It’s way better straight from the tap. Just like draft beer is better than bottled beer. And steak is better than hamburger. But we have to suck it up and eat hot dogs sometimes so we can afford to eat steak for special occasions. You get it?”

“No. That’s a stupid analogy. We’re rich. Or at least we can get all the money we want by mojo’ing a bank teller. So we don’t have to eat hot dogs. Come on, Mr. Apex Predator. Mr. Top of the Food Chain. Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t go out and hunt every night whenever I get hungry.”

“Because I said so, that’s why.” As soon as the words came out of my mouth, my eyes went wide. I felt like the stupidest asshat in the world, and the look on Abby’s face told me she agreed.

She let out a peal of laughter and then flipped me off. Then she leaned forward and said, “Look, Jimmy. I like hanging with you and Greg. I really do. And I appreciate the whole keeping me from dying a couple times thing. But let’s be clear here—I am not your bitch. I am not your little sister, your daughter, your protégé, or any damn thing else.
And
if I want to go out and be the Big Bad and drink from the puny mortals, I will.
And
if you try to stop me, we’ll throw down. Are we clear?”

There was a cold look in her blue eyes. I knew she was serious. I didn’t have much in the way of an answer.

“So if you want me to leave, I’ll pack my shit and be gone come nightfall. Or if you want me to stay, I’ll be happy to hang around and play Scooby Gang with you and Sabrina and Greg. I like you guys, I really do. But this is who I am now. This is who you helped make me. And that’s just the deal. So can you live with it, or do I leave?”

I thought for a long moment, then looked her in the eyes. “You’re discreet?”

“Like a ninja.”

“You’re careful.”

“Like a bomb tech.”

“You really want to stay and help us fight the bad guys?”

“Yeah, it’s fun.”

“Then we’d like for you to stay.” She squealed a little and clapped her hands, looking even younger than she really was. I held up one finger. “But I do have one request.”

“Lay it on me.”

“Can you at least try to be a little more subtle, sensitive even? It really bugs Greg, so just . . . don’t flaunt the hunting thing, okay?”

“I’m a hot blonde, Jimmy. Subtle ain’t exactly something we’re taught. Subtle is for brunettes and girls who wait in line at clubs. But I’ll try to be sensitive to Greg’s point of view.”

“Thanks. I’m gonna get a little more sleep. I think we’re gonna have a busy couple nights. The Scooby Gang may have caught another case.” I got up and started for the stairs.

“Hey, Jimmy?” I stopped and turned to look at her.

“Yeah, Abby?”

“Thanks. I don’t want to leave. I really like it here.”

“We like you, too.”

As I went upstairs I couldn’t help but think we weren’t finished having this conversation.