Black Knight 02 - Back in Black (17 page)

"Two things, Mr. Smithson." I butted in. "One, we aren't here to kill you, we really are working with the police to find who attacked you. And two, how is it that everybody with even the slightest bit of supernatural juju can spot us as vampires in the first ten seconds?"
 

"Have you looked in a mirror lately, Mr. Black?" The fairy asked.
 

"Not in almost two decades, thanks for the reminder." I snarled.
 

"Oops. Forgot about that bit. Sorry. Anyway, you look like a vampire. Pale skin, dark circles under your eyes, a penchant for dark clothing. You're either a vampire or an office intern, and no office intern is calling on me after business hours."
 

"Maybe you should be the detective." I said grumpily.
 

"But if you're not here to kill me, then why are you here?" He was really confused. I guess I would be too, if I met me and knew what I was, then found out that I wasn't going to try and eat me. Wait, that didn't make any sense. Oh hell, you know what I mean.
 

"We mentioned that, didn't we? We're trying to find out who's behind these attacks and put an end to them. So we wanted to see if you had any more information you hadn't already given us." Sabrina prodded.
 

"Oh, I have it. I just can't give it to you. I'm sorry, Detective, but you're not nearly scary enough for me to spill those beans. Would you care for a beer? Because I certainly need another." With that, he walked to the fridge, only to blink in surprise when I was standing in front of him.
 

"I think you're going to need to answer our questions, Mr. Smithson. Now I'd rather not force you, so please don't make this difficult." I said very slowly and distinctly. I like to make sure I speak clearly when I threaten people.
 

"There's nothing difficult about it, Mr. Black. I can't answer your questions, and you can't force me. Your compulsion won't work on the Fae, and I have certain other things at my disposal as well." He looked down, and I followed his eyes to the pointed wooden spike he was holding pressed up against my chest. "Now, if you'll excuse me, I believe I was on a beer run." I got out of his way and went back to sit next to Greg. Jerry returned with a beer for everyone, and we all drank.
 

"Now, that's much more civilized, isn't it? I am truly sorry I can't help you with your investigation, but you have to understand - I lived through one encounter with those...people, and there are no guarantees that I will survive a second."
 

"Is there anything you can tell us about your attackers? What if they come back? What will you do then? Why are they targeting gay men? Anything?" Sabrina almost pleaded.
 

"I cannot tell you anything other than what I have already let slip. I have it on good authority that they will not be back, and in case you haven't noticed, I have healed with no lasting effects. It was an unpleasant experience, and an uncomfortable healing process, but those things that do not kill us, leave us stronger for the experience." Smithson sipped his beer calmly as Sabrina got up and paced around his den.
 

"Great," I muttered. "A Nietzschian fairy, that's all I need."
 

"And they aren't attacking gay men. They're attacking fairies. They don't care who we sleep with; it's what we
are
that gets them interested. I happen to be attracted to women, not that it is any business of yours." Smithson looked a little perturbed as he finished off his second beer.
 

Sabrina had stopped dead in her tracks, though. "You're straight?"

"As the proverbial arrow."
 

"So this isn't a gay-bashing." Greg's grasp of the obvious was still one of his greatest assets, apparently.
 

"I think it cannot be, as I am not gay." Smithson replied.
 

"Then all the victims must have been Fae." Sabrina said. "Greg, call up all the victims' photos on your iPad. Mr. Smithson, do you know these men? Are they fairies?"
 

He looked closely at the iPad. "What a marvelous device! I must get one. But yes, in answer to the more pressing question, all of these men are Fae. I do not know them all personally, but have seen them at one time or another. Several of them happen to also be gay, and many of us are mistakenly labeled as such, which seems to have confused your investigation. Now, if there is nothing else?" He stood, motioning us toward the door, and it was obvious that our conversation was over.
 

"Thank you, Mr. Smithson. You may very well have been more help than you intended to be." Sabrina said as we walked to the door.
 

"I sincerely hope not, Detective. Not only would it not go well for me if I were discovered to have aided your investigation, but it would not do well for you to be too successful in this endeavor. I truly hope you fail in your search; it will be better for your health. And Mr. Black?" He said, ushering us out into the night.
 

"Yes, Mr. Smithson?"
 

"Your invitation into my home, and Mr. Knightwood's, is hereby revoked. Begone from this place." I felt a barrier slam up in front of his door, and an unseen force pushed me back as he closed the real door on us.
 

"Well, that was new." I said.
 

"Not really, we've been thrown out of better joints than that." Greg replied.
 

"Yeah, but we're sober now."
 

"Oh yeah. Good point."
 

Chapter 25

The rest of the victims were even less helpful, if that's at all possible. Victims Two and Five had left town, Victim Three slammed the door in our face and screamed "Rape!" until we left his apartment building, and Victim Four offered us a very tasty red wine and told us absolutely nothing. At least we got a decent glass of wine out of that stop. It was a dispirited bunch that trudged down the steps into our apartment in the early morning hours, and we were all getting cranky and hungry. Sabrina had made us drive through McDonald's after our last stop, and my mood was not improved by having to smell those glorious fries all the way home. Can you imagine smelling McDonald's fries for decades and never being able to eat one?
 

I hung my coat and guns in the closet and trudged over to the fridge. "O, B, or A?" I asked Greg.
 

"One of each." He yelled from the bathroom. I told him not to order the milkshake, but he's never gotten the sugar craving out of his system. I tossed his bags of blood on the coffee table and bit into a bag of B-negative. The cold blood wasn't terribly appealing, what with the anticoagulants and plastic taste, but I needed to fill the void. Besides, if I closed my eyes and sniffed hard enough, I could almost pretend I was eating Sabrina's fries.
 

"You want one?" She asked, holding out a sliver of salty potato nirvana.
 

"Not worth the stomachache," I told her. "I'll stick to liquids. Well, Mike, you gonna say something or just lay there on my couch all night?" I said to the priest, who had been unsuccessfully hiding in my den when we came in.
 

"You knew?" He asked, impressed.
 

"I'm hungry. I smelled you from the top of the stairs. Been biting your nails to the quick again?"
 

"An old habit I revert to in times of stress." He answered.
 

"And this case has you stressed? That's sweet." I said.
 

"I do have other things in my life, James. As much as it may amaze you, I do not live solely to be your daytime errand boy." There was an odd note in Mike's voice, but he waved aside my concerned look. "Don't listen to me; I'm just an old man up past my bedtime. But I am an old man with information."
 

"Well spill, old man, let's hear about your fact-finding mission to the Witch's coven." I finished off my pints and grabbed a beer from the fridge.
 

"You're not going to leave those on the counter, are you?" Greg asked as he sat down in the den.
 

"Of course not." I said, taking the blood bags I was going to leave on the counter and throwing them away. That led to me realizing that the trash bag was full, which after a look from Sabrina led to me tying it up and putting a new bag in the can. Then, because by now all three of them were watching me and obviously judging me based on my domestic capabilities, I took the full bag upstairs to the dumpster behind our caretaker's cottage. After all that, and amidst much grumbling about the fact that Batman never had to take out the trash, I finally sat down with my warming beer and looked expectantly at Mike.
 

"Well?" I asked. "You said you had information?"
 

"Sorry. I had almost forgotten it, what with all your detours." He and the rest of the peanut gallery enjoyed a few yuks at my expense while I waited impatiently. After the chuckling had died down, Mike continued. "Anna and her friends have noticed an increase in magical energy in recent weeks, much of it centered north of Uptown."
 

"There is a disturbance in the Force," I intoned gravely. Mike and Sabrina shot me a look and I shut up. At least Greg laughed.
 

"Anyway," Mike went on. "According to the witches, there has been a great deal of powerful magic in use, and by several powerful practitioners. They fear that something dangerous may be on the horizon."
 

I raised my hand, and Mike looked over at me. "Are we talking about slip on a crack, break your mother's back kind of dangerous, or raising a demon to take over the world kind of dangerous."
 

"They couldn't tell me." Mike said ruefully. "I think they were a little embarrassed that they didn't really understand the nature of the forces at play, but they seemed to think that it was not world-threatening."
 

"Well that's certainly a relief. I mean, saving the world is the kind of thing I try to keep down on a once a year basis. Did they have anything else for you, or just that there was a big pile of magic being tossed around somewhere north of downtown?" I asked.
 

"Uptown." Mike corrected automatically.
 

"You realize that those are ridiculous arbitrary labels for the same piece of real estate, right?" The whole uptown/downtown thing always bugged me. People who grew up here, like me, called the center of town "downtown," because that's what you always call the center of town. But a few years ago, the rich folks in the middle of the city decided that it should be called "uptown." So now there's all this confusion about what to call an area of like eight square blocks. But this is the same town where you can stand at the intersection of Queens Road and Queens Road, so what do you expect?

"No matter what you call the neighborhood, the disturbance seems to emanate from the industrial district between downtown and the arts district on North Davidson Street." Mike rattled his glass and looked at me meaningfully, and I motioned for Greg to fix him another Scotch.
 

"Alrighty, then. There's a gallery crawl tomorrow night, so let's go out among the hippies and freaks and see if we can turn over a rock and find a troll underneath." I said. "If there's something going on up there that needs juice, there will be plenty of souls running around to siphon off of."
 

"Good idea," said Sabrina. I looked at her, waiting for the other shoe to drop. "No really," she said, "that's a good idea. We should do that." Before I could get used to the idea of her actually liking one of my ideas for once, her phone rang.
 

"Law," she answered curtly. As soon as I heard the voice on the other end, I was on my way to the closet to grab my guns and coat. I put the Glock in my shoulder rig and strapped my Ruger to an ankle holster. As I was pulling on my coat, I tried to listen to the conversation between Sabrina and her panicked cousin.
 

"He...it's back!" I heard him through the phone. Greg bolted for his room to gear up as well, while poor Mike, unblessed with vampire hearing, had no idea what was going on, just that it must be bad. "It's beating the hell out of the cop in the hallway, and then it's coming in here for me! Sabrina, you've got to help me! Oh my God, get away from him! No, Alex!"
 

As she bolted for the stairs, Sabrina yelled into the phone "We're on our way!"
 

I looked back at Mike and said, "Grab her shoes, bro, and come on! We might need a little divine intervention." We dashed up the stairs and jumped in Sabrina's car. She flipped down the hidden LED flashers from behind the sun visor and tore out of the cemetery parking lot like a bat out of hell. I just hoped we weren't too late for Stephen. Or Alex.

Chapter 26

We weren't the first cops on the scene by a long shot, but Sabrina badged herself and Mike through with no trouble. Greg and I didn't bother, we just ran for the stairs. I was out of the car before it stopped, rolling awkwardly toward the building and springing up at a dead run. And when we run, we
move
. I didn't really stop for the door, just ripped it out of the frame and ran up the three flights of stairs to Stephen's floor. I was about to rip that door off the hinges, too, when Greg grabbed my arm.