Hard Day's Knight (17 page)

“Mike, you might want to go ahead and go back to the church. Get some rest, this is probably going to take a few hours at least.”

“Jimmy-boy, I know I’m not as young as I once was, but I can miss a night’s sleep without too many ill effects. Besides, I can sleep in your room if I need to catch a little shut-eye while you’re talking to the young lady.”

“That’s your call, Mikey, but if I were still alive I’d be afraid that Jimmy’s laundry would rise up in the middle of the morning and strangle me. I’m beat. If you think you can keep T.J. Hooker here from getting away, I’m gonna crash for a few hours.”

“Fair enough, Greg. ‘Night.”

“Night.” He went into his room and closed the door. A few seconds later we could hear music coming from inside. Greg likes to sleep to music, which is okay when he’s in an Enya mood, like tonight. It’s way less okay when he decides to be lulled to sleep by Green Day.

I finished my drink and turned back to Detective Law. “We’re vampires.” I waited, but there was no reaction. “Well?”

“Well, what?”

“Well, don’t you have anything to say to that?”

“Look, Jim, I’ve been a detective for the last ten years. This might surprise you, but you’re not the first person I’ve come across that thinks he’s a vampire. I figured that out a while ago. The black clothes, the no eating food, the nighttime-only business hours. Obviously you’re part of some type of vampire cult or something.”

I sighed. This had to be like coming out of the closet to your parents and having them respond with “Well, duh.” Which actually happened to a chick I knew in college. This was that level of embarrassing. I tried again. “You’re missing the point. We’re not pretend vampires, we’re the real deal. We drink blood, we have fangs, we live underground in a cemetery, for crying out loud!”

“Sure, and I bet if I look in your crisper I’ll find bags of blood from some orderly you bribed at a hospital, right? And I don’t see any fangs. And I haven’t seen any indication of superhuman strength, speed, or any other vampire…” She trailed off because I’d bounded across the room in one step and picked her up over my head, chair and all. With one hand.

“You were mentioning strength? And speed?” I lowered her to the floor and leaned in close, fangs on display. “And I think you were looking for these pointy bits?”

She nodded, her mouth opening and closing like a flounder on the deck of a fishing boat, and I went back to my seat, retracting my fangs as I went. “We keep the fangs tucked away until we need them, because they make it hard to talk, and they tend to cut our lips if we leave them out all the time. Not to mention the name of the game is to hide what we are. And yes, we do indeed bribe an orderly for our blood supply, but if pressed we can certainly take our meals on the hoof, as it were. Greg pretty much never eats take out, but every so often I feel the need for a nibble. It reminds me exactly where I stand on the food pyramid – at the absolute top. Now do you believe me?”

She looked from me to Mike and back to me again. She shook herself slightly and refocused on Mike. “But I thought you were a priest? And I thought vampires couldn’t tolerate holy symbols, or holy ground? So how do you live here?”

Mike laughed and leaned back in his chair. “Oh dear me, no! I’m not a vampire. I’m just a priest. Jimmy and Greg and I grew up together, and we’ve been friends for far too long to let a little thing like turning into the living dead get in the way!” She relaxed a little, probably relieved to know that we have a friend that we haven’t eaten.

“But wait, if you two grew up together, then that means you’re…” she stumbled with trying to find a polite way to say it.

“Older than I look. Yeah, we’re all about the same age, give or take a year. Mike’s the oldest, but we’re all pushing forty. Fringe benefit of being dead – you don’t age.”

“So you’re really vampires? You and the pudgy one?”

“Yep, and please don’t mention the weight thing – he’s sensitive.”

“And you really drink blood?”

“Yep.”

“And you really can’t go out in the sunlight?”

“Poof!” I confirmed.

“Holy symbols?”

“Bad juju?”

“Stakes?”

“Dead as doornails.”

“Decapitation?”

“Ruins our night forever.”

“Garlic?”

“Total myth. I love Italians.”

“Running water?”

“I shower every day, so running water is not an issue.”

“Silver?”

“Hurts, but doesn’t kill. I’ve never been shot with a silver bullet, and it’s not an experiment that I’d care to try.”

“How?”

“How what?” I figured we’d get to this question eventually. I wasn’t really crazy about the answer, but it was going to come out, and I did kinda promise full disclosure.”

“How did you two become vampires?”

“That’s a long story.”

“Well, I think I have all day. Because I’m not leaving until my curiosity is satisfied, and I don’t think you’re going anywhere until sundown.”

“Alright, but I’m gonna need another drink.” So I went to get more liquor, and a fresh beer for the lady, and settled in to tell her our story.

“So I guess I should start at the beginning. My name is James Knight, and I was born in 1974, right here in Charlotte. I’ve always preferred Jimmy, though, so feel free to call me that. Greg and I met in junior high school and were best friends ever since. We met on the first day of school when we were both in seventh grade. It wasn’t exactly what you’d call the most auspicious of meetings – we were jammed into lockers after gym class by a couple of jocks-in-training.

“I’ve always been this skinny, and Greg has always been a little heavy, so middle school was rough, to say the least. We were those kids in the corner of the lunchroom, invisible unless you needed someone to pick on. The guys who spent all their recess time playing Dungeons & Dragons in the library instead of doing anything to dispel their ghostly pallor. Come to think of it, we weren’t real fond of direct sunlight even before we were turned.” I gave a little chuckle at that, but the detective didn’t seem amused. Good to see my sense of humor is still killin’ with the ladies after all these years.

“Greg and I were best friends, along with Mikey here, all through middle and high school. We were pretty inseparable, even built a treehouse in Mike’s back yard. That didn’t work out so well, because we were all kinda brainy kids, without a shop class between us, so our treehouse didn’t last through the first big rainstorm. Even worse, we were inside it when it came tumbling to the ground. But we were a modern-day Three Musketeers, tied together by lack of athletic ability and lack of enough common sense to shut up when the football boys were picking on us.

“We made it through high school with just the normal assortment of angst, self-loathing and wedgies, and off we went to college. Greg and I went to Clemson together, deciding to room together in one of the dorms with a bunch of engineering majors to cut down on the beatings we had to endure. Mike went off to seminary, and we didn’t see him again until a whole lot of things had changed.”

I looked over at Mike, and he gave me a slight nod. There was a lot I wasn’t saying to the nice police lady, especially about a big fight the three of us had right before high school graduation when Mike told Greg and I that he wasn’t coming to Clemson with us. He’d gotten his calling late in our senior year, and pretty much kept it to himself until we were making plans for our beach trip after graduation. I’d been really upset with him for breaking up The Musketeers, as I referred to the three of us, and had said some pretty unkind things, including that I never wanted to see him again for the rest of my life. I didn’t. I’m not sure that he’s ever forgiven me for that. I haven’t.

“Our first year of college was fantastic. We were finally around other people that were bigger nerds than us, and it was great. I was actually one of the cool kids in the dorm, because I had a fake ID and could buy beer. It was possibly the worst fake ID in history, as it showed a picture of a fifty-year-old black Vietnam Vet named Harold, but none of the grocery store clerks around campus cared back then. So we navigated college without much in the way of physical abuse, because it’s a lot easier to hide when there are a few thousand other math dorks around.

“Greg got a degree in computer engineering, and I managed to flunk, cut, drop and incomplete my way to a BA in English with a minor in Psychology. I had no idea what I wanted to do except drink beer and play video games, but there’s not a degree path in that, so I thought English would be the next best thing. I looked at theatre for a while, but I like girls and I didn’t smoke enough weed, so English it was.

“We’d just graduated in May of 1996 when I ran into a spectacularly hot chick in a bar not far from campus. Now this wasn’t the average college town hottie, this girl was
Playboy
hot. And for some reason, she was interested in me. Not one to look a gift horse in the mouth, I brought her back to our apartment after plying her with enough cheap beer to float an offensive lineman. Of course, things probably would have worked out very differently if I had looked her in the mouth, but that would have ruined the story, wouldn’t it?

“So we got involved, and then we got very involved. And just as I was about to reach the peak of my involvement…”

“I get it.” Interjected Detective Law, with a slightly pained expression on her face.

“Sorry. Sometimes I’m a tad inappropriate. Comes with the teeth. Anyway, just at that special moment, she bit me. And I’m not talking a love nip. I’m talking a fangs-out, attack the carotid, drain you dry kinda bite. Now I don’t think this is the time or place to discuss the, um, finer points of the effect of a vampire bite on the erogenous zones of the human body, but let it suffice to say that while it scared the crap out of me, it also heightened the pleasure to the point of deliriousness.”

“Are you saying you…” Detective Law trailed off, looking unsure of how to continue.

“Yep. Right as I died. Made for an embarrassing corpse, I’m sure, but that wasn’t my concern until quite a while later. So she drained me, in more ways than one, and left me there, on my couch.”

“The couch? Not even in the bedroom?”

“Sorry to offend your sensibilities, Detective, but people do occasionally have sex in other places than the bedroom. And we were in a hurry. I thought she was in a hurry for my sweet lovin’, and I was in a hurry to score with the hottest girl I’d ever spoken to before she realized how out of my league she really was. So she left me there, dead and naked from the waist down on my couch, which was how Greg found me a few hours later. And don’t think that hasn’t made for a few awkward moments in the last fifteen years.”

“Wait…hours? It only takes hours for the…whatever you call it to happen?”

“Apparently. I’ve only turned one person, and that one took all day to process and wake up, but I don’t know if that was because I turned him near sunrise, or because I was a very young vampire when I turned him, or because of some other reason that I don’t know about.”

“Who did you turn?” I just looked at her. “Oh.”

“Yeah.
Oh
. Greg got home a couple of hours after she’d killed me, and found my dead, naked body on the couch in front of the television. According to his account of events, he didn’t even notice I was dead, or naked for that matter, until he threw a Nintendo remote to me to play a video game and it bounced off my face. He freaked out and started screaming like a little girl, which is why he went to bed rather than hear me tell this story again. It paints him in a less than macho light, and Greg is very concerned about appearances.

“So after he calmed down enough to stop screaming, he checked me for a pulse, and the went to look for the cordless phone and call the police. When he touched my neck, I snapped awake. I could feel his pulse through his fingertips, and I could almost hear his blood calling to me. So I woke up, conscious but not really in control of myself, and when I saw him on the phone trying to remember the number for 911, I snuck up behind him and drained him dry in the middle of the efficiency kitchen in our off-campus apartment.”

That was a vast oversimplification of things, but she didn’t need to know everything. She didn’t need to know how sweet the blood tasted right from the spring, how amazing and hot and rich it felt as it went down my throat, taking my dead flesh and pouring life into it. It felt like I was forcing his blood down into my desiccated veins, and with every beat of his heart I could feel myself getting stronger, more alive than I had ever been. Everything around me had new color, every sound was crisper, every smell sharper, and the taste was like the most incredible wine and steak and chocolate all rolled into one set of overwhelming sensations.

And as I felt the life drain out of my best friend I didn’t care at all about what I was taking away from him, so focused was I on what I was getting out of the exchange. I could hear his heartbeat slowing in my ears, could feel the pulse in his veins getting weaker and weaker with every minute I stayed latched onto him like a pit bull with a t-bone. And I didn’t care. I didn’t care that I was killing my best friend. I didn’t care that I was drinking the life right from his throat like a comic book monster. All I cared about was how amazing it felt.

The pretty detective with the adorable brown curls didn’t need to know just how much like sex it was to drink someone’s blood. And she certainly didn’t need to know how much that hunger, the almost overwhelming desire to taste fresh blood every night or two kept me up at night. And how much harder it got every year to keep the hunger locked away. So I glossed over the finer points of the murder of my childhood friend and roommate, and skipped ahead a few hours.

“By the time I had drank my fill, Greg was dead. I drained him completely, and kept drinking until there wasn’t a spare drop lurking in his veins. Even with that, I was still half-crazy with hunger, but I managed to pull myself together enough to realize what I’d done. At least part of it. I really freaked out then, trashing the apartment and generally losing my mind for a couple of hours. The only reason I lived through the morning was because I felt too awful about what I’d done to leave Greg’s body behind. If I’d run out looking for more food I would have burnt to cinders before I found breakfast.