Hard Day's Knight (14 page)

“Yes, boys, it does. She’ll be here in fifteen minutes. I hope you don’t mind meeting her here. After all, the whole ‘invite me in’ thing could become awkward if we went to her apartment.”

“Fair enough, I suppose. Greg, you wanna tidy up a bit before we have another guest?” I asked from my seat on the couch.

“Um, no. Those are your socks, bro. You pick up the toxic waste. I’ll give the kitchen a lick and a promise, but the footwear funk-factory is all you.” He headed off to wipe down the counters and put the blood in the crisper so our culinary restrictions wouldn’t be immediately apparent while I got to work picking up the dirty clothes in the den.

Admittedly, my idea of picking up the clothes was to toss all the laundry on the floor of my room and close the door, but it made the den look better. Mike straightened up the video game equipment, and actually found a scented candle to put out on the coffee table. After about ten minutes, the place smelled significantly less like a locker room and Mike had ceased to make comments about us having the hygiene of a pack of feral dogs.

A knock at the top of the stairs announced the arrival of our guest, followed immediately by a trim pair of legs coming into view on the steps. The legs were, as is the norm, attached to a woman who looked nothing like my mental picture of an overweight gypsy woman with three teeth and a mole on her nose that had its own zip code. Instead, the woman in our living room was medium height, slim, with straight blonde hair that hung halfway down her back. She was younger than I expected, and very pretty in a blonde Sandra Bullock kinda way.

She wore Birkenstocks (of course) and socks under a flowing skirt, and I was pretty sure I caught a glimpse of legging as well. A bulky sweater was her only concession to the late October chill, and I remembered suddenly that humans still felt cold, and that folks that didn’t need to hide shoulder holsters could wear things like sweaters. I promised myself that I would go completely unarmed for a night when this case was over, just to see how it felt.

“Hello,” she said, her warm voice filling the room with a sense of well-being. “I’m Anna. How are you, Mike? You sounded worried on the phone.”

“I was worried, my dear, but I feel much better now that you’re here.” Mike’s accent had slipped, and a little of the old South he grew up in had dropped into his words as he gave the pretty witch a brief, and chaste, hug. Good to know my old friend was celibate, but not blind. “These are my friends, Jimmy and Greg.” He pointed to each of us in turn, and I stepped forward to shake her hand.

I was surprised when she pulled back, reaching quickly inside her sweater to drop a pentagram necklace out into view. It began to glow, and I took a quick step back. “Hey now, no need to get all magical in my den, lady.” I exclaimed.

“I know you, vampire.” She said, and when I looked up at her eyes, they were a cold blue, staring right into my soul. If I had one left. The jury’s been out on that one for a while.

“Nope, pretty sure we’ve never met.” I replied. “But if you want to get together sometime for a quick bite, just let me know.” I bared a little fang at her, and paid close attention to where Greg was moving behind me. I heard his pistol clear the holster and knew that he had my back. I guessed he was still in the kitchen with the gun hidden below the counter. As long as I kept her attention on me, my partner could keep her covered. “Mike, you want to explain to Mrs. Broomstick here that we’re the good guys?”

“It’s true, Anna. These boys have been friends of mine since before I entered the seminary. I’ve known them since we were boys in school together, and they’re good lads. They have their problems, sure, but good lads nonetheless.”

“Mike,” the witch said, keeping her voice level and her eyes locked on me, carefully not looking in my eyes. “This good lad, as you call him, is a vampire.”

“And you’re a witch,” I said. “And by the way, you might as well look me in the eye, our mojo doesn’t work like that. And it doesn’t work at all with your necklace in the way. Now can we get past our little stereotypes and species bias and work together to deal with the body-snatching demon and the zombie infestation?” I went back to my spot on the couch and took a seat. Anna followed me with her eyes, then made her way to the armchair and sat facing me. Obviously she knew I was a vampire, but it looked like Greg’s status as a bloodsucking fiend was as yet unknown to our new teammate.

“So are we good?” I asked as she got settled. “We wouldn’t have called you over here, to our home, unless we thought we could trust you, and unless we needed you. Mike was pretty convincing on the first count, and the situation pretty much covers the second.”

“What’s the situation?” She asked, pulling a Macbook out of her backpack. “Is there Wi-Fi here?”

“Yes,” said Greg from where he suddenly stood right behind her chair. I almost fell off the couch laughing as Anna jumped about eight feet straight up. Obviously she really didn’t know that Greg was a vampire, and his vamp-speed to right behind her got the desired reaction.

“The password is TruBlood. Capital T, capital B.” He said as she glared at him. I shot him a look, too, but that was just for picking a dorky password.

“Seriously? You’re just going to Wikipedia ‘zombies’ or something? Tubby over there coulda managed that without too much prodding.” I leaned back on the couch, not just to get further away from her glowing necklace, but also because I think she might have caught me checking her out. Leave me alone; I’m not
dead
. Well, I am dead, but I’m not dead and blind.

“I’m not just going to Wikipedia it. I have a group of friends I can contact online that may have some firsthand knowledge of what we’re working on.”

“You know people who have their own pet zombies?” I marveled. “Now that’s cool.”

She sat there for a few minutes typing and muttering to herself and generally looking way hotter than any woman that had been in our apartment in decades. Or ever, for that matter. After a couple of “hmmms” and the odd “mmmm-mmmm,” I got bored and went to the fridge for a snack. Greg immediately plopped down in my seat on the couch and yelled over to me “You keep eating this late at night, you’re gonna get fat!”

“We can’t get fat, dork. You want anything?”

“Yeah, throw me a bag of B-Neg.” I tossed him the bag and hopped up on the bar that overlooked the living room, my own blood bag in hand.

“Either of you guys want anything to drink?” I asked our guests. “We don’t have any food, for obvious reasons, but we’ve got a couple Cokes…”

“Not so much,” Greg corrected.

“Okay,” I went on, “we had a couple Cokes, but we’ve got beer, ginger ale, and a lot of booze. There might even be some orange juice left.”

“Again, not so much,” chimed in my gluttonous partner.

“Jesus Christ! Do you ever replace what you drink?”

“Heh heh. Nah, I usually count on the marrow to do that for me.” We both laughed, because sophomoric vamp humor never goes out of style. It’s like a fart joke, only different.

“Anyway, either of you want a drink?” Anna and Mike replied in the negative, so Greg and I drank our blood in silence while Anna worked. Mike looked a little unhappy about us drinking in front of his friend, but hey, she knew what we were, no point in hiding it. Cold blood is kinda flat tasting, but it’s better than room temperature. Obviously it tastes better at body temp, but I didn’t want to offend Greg again by going off to hunt. And we did have work to do. So it was O-positive flavored with plastic and anticoagulants for me. Yippee.

While Anna was hacking away, I looked over at Mike. “Hey, Dad?”

“Yes, Jimmy?”

“Did you ever find anything more out from the girl?”

“The girl?”

“You remember, little girl, possessed by a demon, threatened our client with a death curse, got us into this whole mess?”

“Oh yes. Michelle was her name. What do you want to know?”

“Well, let’s start with how she was planning on cursing Tommy Harris and his whole family into oblivion.”

“Oh that.” Mike actually sounded amused. “That was actually a mistake.”

“Huh?”

“It was a mistake.”

“I heard you, I just didn’t get it. What do you mean, a mistake? She didn’t mean to curse him?”

“Oh, no! She definitely meant to curse him, she just didn’t know how.”

“I don’t get it.”

“The little girl had dabbled in some witchcraft, but was by no means a skilled enough spellcaster to actually make a curse stick.”

“So she didn’t curse Tommy?”

“Not with anything meaningful, no.”

“So he was never in any danger?”

“Not until you confronted the possessed child with him in tow, no.”

“Great. I love my life. So this little girl just happened to be the one possessed, and it really has nothing to do with our case at all?”

“Well, it may certainly be the case that her experimentation with magic made her more attractive to outside influence, but that is generally the case.”

“So this was all just a mistake, and we never should have gotten involved in the first place?”

“Basically, yes.”

“Story of my life.” I went for another drink and sat down on the couch to wait for the hacker witch to finish. I had plenty more questions for Mike, I just didn’t think I could handle any more good news.

It was the better part of an hour before Anna looked back up from her computer. “Oh, are you all still here?” She asked, blinking rapidly like someone waking up from a nap.

“We live here. Where would we have gone?” I asked, not gently. “We’re waiting on you to give us instructions on how to send zombies back to Hell.”

“Actually, James, we want to be very careful about that. We only want to send the inhabiting souls back to Hell. The bodies we very much would like to return to their resting places.” Mike corrected me.

“Fair enough, Padre. But I’m not digging. I didn’t get this manicure just to dig graves.” I was half-joking. I’ve never had a manicure. But I was serious about the no digging part.

“Okay, here’s what I’ve got.” Anna stood up in front of the television, which got Greg’s attention. He threw an Xbox controller at her, which she caught and winged right back at him.
Not bad
, I thought. “It sounds like your guesses were right on as to what happened to raise these dead bodies. The souls that were raised and locked into the kidnapped girls were banished from their hosts, but not sent back to Hell. So they gravitated to the nearest empty vessels, and thus we ended up with a bunch of zombies.”

“Yeah, we got that part.” I muttered.

“So now,” she went on, shooting me a dagger glare, “we must gather all the zombies in one place and banish their spirits. This will empty the vessels, returning them to their previously inert state, and send the possessing spirits back to their last plane of existence.”

I got a little lost after the inherent pee joke in “empty the vessels,” so I raised my hand. “So we send them back to Hell and the dead guys go back to being dead?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“We knew that. You got a plan as to how?” I was starting to get irritated. I mean, hot is one thing, but we’d just wasted an hour and a half of a rapidly dwindling night and we didn’t know anything more than we had before this chickadee got here.

“Yes. My coven is gathering at the fountain in Marshall Park. If we can get all the zombies there by dawn, we can banish the spirits in a sunrise ceremony.” I choked a little at the s-word, but she didn’t even slow down. “So now we go get the zombies, incapacitate them, and drop them at the park with my coven. They can bind the creatures long enough for us to exorcise them, for lack of a better term.” She looked apologetically at Mike, who gave a little nod. No one wanted him to think we were stepping on his theological turf, but he wasn’t terribly well-equipped for this sort of thing, dogma-wise.

“Alright, that sounds like a plan. A crappy one that will probably end up with some of your coven having their brains eaten, but it’s the best one we have. Any idea how to find these zombies?” I asked.

“I’m on that one,” Greg piped up. “I’ve been following police reports on my laptop,” which really impressed me, since I thought he’d just been messing around on FaceBook the whole time. “and it seems like the zombies are all converging on one spot. I don’t have enough data yet to figure out where that is, but I think I can use the info I do have to give us a best guess as to where to go.”

I raised my hand. “Hey Professor Pugsley, do I even want to try to understand how you’re doing that, or should I just wait until you give me the signal and then hit something really hard?”

“Let’s all play to our strengths. I’ll do the thinking, Mike will do the driving, Anna will do the banishing and you do the punching.”

“Sounds good to me. Give me a minute to gear up and I’ll be right with you.” I headed over to the coat closet but stopped cold at Mike’s voice.

“Remember, no guns.” I turned around almost slowly enough to be a parody of myself, and looked at him.

“Why not, exactly? I understood the whole ‘no killing the little girls’ rule, because regardless of my membership in the Walking Dead Society, I’m not a
monster
. But Mike, these guys are already dead. It’s not like they’re going to get upset about it.”

“First, you technically are a monster. There are movies and everything. Secondly, I cannot allow you to defile the dead in my presence. I am a man of the cloth, after all.” He crossed his arms and gave me his best priestly gaze. The priestly gaze works much better on people who didn’t steal licorice from the corner drugstore with you when you were seven.

“I won’t hold your career decisions against you if you don’t hold mine against me. And as much as I love you, Mikey, I’m taking the shotgun for the zombies. Get over it.”

“Then I’m not driving.”

“Fine, we’ll take Greg’s car.” I caught sight of Greg out of the corner of my eye gesturing wildly at me, but I ignored him. As usual, it turned out to be a bad idea.

“Greg’s car isn’t here. You left it at the bowling alley, where it has doubtless been towed to the police impound lot by now.” Crap. I hate it when other people are right. Because it usually means that I’m wrong. And because it happens so much of the time. So now I had to use non-lethal methods to subdue a dozen dead guys, and I had to figure out how to get Greg’s car out of hock without ending up arrested. Again.