Paint it Black: 4 (The Black Knight Chronicles) (3 page)

SABRINA DROVE ME back to my place and went inside as I took off my ruined shoes, socks, and jeans. I stood on the porch in just my boxers and a battered Spider-Man T-shirt and just looked around for a minute. “My place” was an old two-story frat house that Greg and I had taken over once we slaughtered the last inhabitants, a coven of collegiate vampires and their “Professor” master, a few months ago. It was a great lair, with two floors aboveground and a full basement that was light-tight and had Fort Knox–level security. I shook my head at the absurdity of living in an undead fraternity house and went inside.

I headed straight for the fridge and grabbed two beers, handed them to Sabrina, and ran upstairs to put on cleaner clothes. As I went down the hall to wash up, I saw the door to Abby’s room standing open. The lights were on, but our young vampire coed was obviously not home. “Not home” was fast becoming her favorite place to be, and it had me a little worried. Then my super-hearing picked up Greg trying to coax Sabrina into a marathon video-game session with him, and I pushed Abby out of my mind. A couple of minutes later I was back on the main floor in a clean T-shirt and clean-ish jeans, at least jeans without evident mud- or bloodstains.

I turned to head downstairs when Greg’s voice floated up to me. “Dude, you’re gonna want another beer. I might have drank yours.” I flipped off the air in his general direction and went back to the fridge. A minute later I was loaded down with the remnants of a six-pack of Miller Lite plus two bags of O-positive, and headed down into our new lair. To most observers the place appeared to be a normal two-story house, Craftsman style, with a dining room, kitchen, office, and library on the main floor. Upstairs was laid out like a dorm, with three bedrooms on either side of the hallway, and a big shared bathroom at the end of the hall. Cohabitating with an impressionable girl vampire led to a few embarrassing moments with Abby until I got used to wearing a towel after I showered.

But the real prize of the house was underneath the standard living space. If you moved the right book on one of the library shelves, the whole bookcase swung out, revealing a staircase. Cliché, I know, but the guy who built the place was traditional. I did have to give him props for building an honest-to-God lair at the bottom of those stairs. One of the first things we did was rig the staircase to stay open all the time. My fault, since I could never remember which book was the right one.

The lair is a huge room, about half the size of a basketball court, and when we moved in, there was an air hockey table, pool table, a full bar, and a couple of mattresses that I didn’t want to think too much about. We burned the mattresses, moved the pool table into one of the spare bedrooms upstairs, and kept the bar and air hockey table. Vampire air hockey is about ten times faster than the regular game and has at least three times the swearing. Downside is our super-strength means we go through a lot of pucks.

Greg spent a month outfitting the basement into a command center, adding a tabletop touch-screen computer, several huge LCD displays on the walls, comfy seating, and a killer sound system. I was pretty sure he could launch nuclear missiles from down there, but I was a little afraid to ask about it. And let’s face it,
Modern Warfare
on a 103-inch LCD display is pretty smokin’. Three months ago I would have just asked him where he got all the money for the toys. But lately Greg was going through a bad patch of hating my guts. I stayed away from anything that might set him off, and I never knew what that was. So, I kept my mouth shut and assumed
he found some way to hack ISPs and keep his online poker empire going.

When I got downstairs, Greg was leaning over the computer table, so I put the beer on it. That never failed to get a reaction, except this time it did. He ignored me completely, just grabbed a bag of blood and drained it without looking up. Sabrina and I shared a look, and she gave me an I-have-no-flippin’-idea shrug.

“What’s up, bro?” I asked, leaning in to see what he was looking at. On the screen were four pictures. Two I recognized as Teresa Chapin and Kellie Inman, the owners of our jawbones. The others were a decent-looking guy with a slightly dated fashion sense and a brunette hottie who looked about twenty-five.

“I recognize these two, but who’s the babe with the eyeliner addiction and the dude trapped in the late eighties?”

“1991,” Greg murmured absently.

“Huh?” I said. I say that a lot, I know. But my friends are all confusing. Sometimes I think it might even be on purpose.

“He’s trapped in 1991. That’s Bruce Marvo, Kellie Inman’s boyfriend. He went missing the same time she did. The brunette in the more recent picture is Veronica Moore, Teresa’s co-worker that vanished with her. Given what we now know about Teresa and Kellie, I think we have to assume that Bruce and Veronica are also dead. I’ve been running over their last known activities, trying to find something that sticks out, something that says who took them, but there’s nothing.”

“Can you define ‘nothing’?” I asked.

“Nothing. As in nothing out of the ordinary. The reports from the more recent disappearances are more complete, but even with better files to study there’s nothing to indicate anything out of the ordinary. Nobody got grabby at work recently. She’s been with the same boyfriend for eight months. They aren’t getting too serious. No trouble with anyone at work—nothing to indicate any connections.” He pulled a chair over and sat down with a sigh. I tossed him another beer, and he absently nodded his thanks at me. This felt almost normal, like maybe my best friend was going to snap out of it sometime soon and stop hating me. And himself.

“We think this is random? Just two kidnappings twenty years apart? I don’t buy it. And something is definitely screwy with the bones. They smell way too old. I’m no bloodhound, but I know dead things, and these things were dead longer than twenty years, not to mention way longer than just a couple weeks. Both girls go missing—Hey, where’s Abby?” My train of thought jumped the tracks as I realized that I hadn’t seen our newest partner all night.

Greg shot me a grumpy look. “Hunting. Again.”

I swear that dude can put more disapproval into two little words than anyone who stands up to pee should be able to convey. Greg did not believe in human hunting and is the next best thing to a vegan vampire. Unless Greg is trapped in another dimension where there are no hospitals or blood banks, he’s not going to drink from a living person.

This is yet another bone of contention between us. I prefer my blood fresh, but out of respect to Greg’s more delicate sensibilities and a deep-seated desire not to arouse the populace and create vigilantes clamoring to stake me in my sleep, I usually restrain myself. Abby does not. She’s a twenty-two-year-old coed with a body like a centerfold and all the entitlement baggage that came with being pretty and young and aware of what that did to men. When she was turned into a vampire a few months ago, she lost her life and her love of chocolate, but kept the entitlement. I didn’t always think it was a fair trade.

Abby likes her blood hot and from the tap, and no amount of “discussion” with Greg has managed to change that. Somehow he blames me for her rebellion, like I’m supposed to be anyone’s role model. I own the world’s largest assortment of comic book T-shirts, and I’m pretty sure that tosses me right out of the running for role model. Role model or not, I still worried.

“Crap. I hope she didn’t go bar hopping downtown again.”

Greg and I exchanged looks. Ordinary, garden-variety bar fights draw the wrong kind of attention and are bad enough, but bar fights where nobody remembers how they started are worse. Bar fights that spill out into three blocks and spark five cases of spontaneous anemia are downright suspicious. I could tell Greg wasn’t happy before he opened his mouth.

“Well, maybe if some folks weren’t running off getting hammered at the drop of a hat, she would have better examples in her life.”

“Seriously? We’re going to have the parenting talk? Now?” My head started to throb at the very idea of having a serious talk about Abby’s behavior, so I downed the rest of my beer and cracked another. That earned me another disapproving look from my portly partner. I indicated Sabrina with a gesture and a stare meant to remind him we had other issues at hand. Didn’t work.

“We’ve got to have it sometime, and I know you metabolize beer too fast to get drunk, so it might as well be now.”

“I thought we were trying to solve a couple of murders, not worry about what our roommate, who happens to be a grown woman, is doing with her free time?” I could hear my voice getting loud, and I tried to bring it back under control, with little success.

Greg stood up, running his hands through his hair in irritation. “It’s about impulse control, Jimmy. She’s got to learn to keep herself under control. And if she can’t learn that here, where is she going to learn it?”

“If she hadn’t learned impulse control by her senior year of college, how has she not ended up on drugs, with every STD in the book, or flunked out of school long before we ever met her?”

“That’s different, dude. The rules are different for us. You heard what Tiram said—he thinks none of civilization’s rules apply to us. Abby drank the Kool-Aid. She’s acting the same way. If we don’t get her under control, she’s going to end up like him, or worse.”

“Worse?”

“Yeah, worse. I don’t know how, but worse. I worry, man. And you’re better with her than I am. I get all tongue-tied and can’t get to the point, and then it all gets awkward and . . .” He sat back down and killed his beer. I handed him another.

I knew the problem. Abby was pretty. Okay, Abby was absolutely smokin’ hot, and Greg never had much luck talking to pretty girls. They always treated him like a fat nerd, which he was, and that just made him more self-conscious. Even after we went vampy he didn’t suddenly turn into Lestat or one of the other fictional vampire studs. He just became a fat nerd with super-strength, speed, enhanced senses, and serious dietary restrictions. Kinda like being lactose intolerant, but to everything. When you’re a guy who likes food, the vamp gig is a bitch.

“I’ll talk to her, okay? I’ll see if I can get her to chill a little.”

“Thanks.”

“You two gonna hug it out now, or what?” Sabrina asked from her chair. “Because I can leave.”

“Why would you want to do that? Stay. You can be the meat in a nerd sandwich,” I said, holding out my arms to her.

“Not right now, nerd-boy. You smell like cheap beer, expensive whiskey, and swamp muck. And that’s just to my normal human sniffer. I don’t see how Greg stays in the same room with you.”

“It’s not easy,” Greg replied. “You should have smelled his room when we were alive. I made it through that, I can make it through anything.”

Except he hadn’t lived through that, and it was my fault. I spoke up quickly, more to keep myself from heading down that road than anything else. “Yeah, okay. Point taken,” I said. “A shower sounds like a great idea. We’ve got nothing new here, so I’m gonna go get cleaned up. Wanna wash my back?” I asked Sabrina as I headed for the stairs.

“Maybe next time. But I will go up and catch a few hours’ sleep. McDaniel wants me in his office at eight tomorrow . . . I mean this morning . . . before we talk to the families.” She followed me upstairs and went into the room she had claimed for her own. I ducked into my room, conveniently right across the hall, wrapped a towel around my waist, and headed down the hall to the shower. I heard a wolf whistle from the crack in Sabrina’s door and flipped her off as I passed.

I scrubbed myself all over a few times and finally got most of the smell of the night’s festivities off me. Then I just slid down in the shower and let the hot water run over my face for a while as I sat there. It felt good, like the scalding water was peeling layers off my skin. And for every layer it peeled off, some problem went away. My guilt over turning Greg, my issues with Abby, my relationship—if you could call it that—with Sabrina, these new-old dead women, all of it spiraled down the drain and out to sea as I sat there, bare butt sliding along the porcelain.

I don’t know how long I sat there, half meditating and half sleeping, but a banging on the door jarred me back to full consciousness. “Jimmy, you still in there?” Sabrina’s voice came through the door.

“Yeah, I’m here. Just finishing up. Sorry.” I hastily turned off the water, noticing that it had run ice-cold while I was in my daze.

“Well, hurry up, I gotta pee, and I don’t want to go all the way downstairs.”

“Gimme just a second.” I dried off as quickly as I could and wrapped the towel back around my waist. Sabrina stood in the hallway in my Xavier University black T-shirt and nothing else that I could see. That shirt looked a whole lot better on her than it ever had on me. I stepped into the hallway. “All yours,” I said.

“’Bout time.”

“Hey, that’s my T-shirt.”

“It was in your dresser, so I guess so. You only keep clean clothes in the dresser, right? I couldn’t tell which stacks and piles on the floor were clean, so I took a chance on the dresser.”

“Yeah, the stuff in the dresser’s clean. And the stacked stuff on the floor is clean. The piled stuff is dirty. It’s all organized, I swear.”

“If you say so.” She slid past me and I saw just a hint of red panties as she slammed the door in my face.

“And I want my T-shirt back! Eventually,” I said as I headed down the hall to my room. I put on a clean pair of boxers and crawled into bed, turning off all the lights as I did.

We don’t really need to sleep regularly, but it’s preferable. We can go for a couple of days at a stretch if we need to, but eventually we crash no matter how much blood we take in. It had been a pretty hectic night, so I was perfectly content to lie down in my own bed, a nice queen-sized frame the former tenants had left. I just flipped the mattress and changed the sheets when we took it over. I wasn’t in any hurry to replace the comfy pillowtop, which is why I hadn’t run a black light anywhere near the thing. The last residents had been a vampire
fraternity
, after all.

I lay there turning the night over in my head, thinking back to moping over my grave, then trying to figure out what to do about Greg, and worrying about Mike, and wondering how to handle Abby and make sure she didn’t get us all staked, and then I shifted over to much more pleasant thoughts of Sabrina in one of my favorite T-shirts and little else. I lied to her—one of the piles was stuff she’d worn that still smelled like her. I hadn’t bothered to wash that stuff. I liked having her scent in the room even if she wasn’t. And thinking like that took me down a whole different road, pondering our relationship and where we were going.