Black Knight

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For Abir, I Love You More

PROLOGUE

EVERY NIGHT, FOR NINE NIGHTS
in a row, I dream of a guy I’ve never met. He’s always working the same job. Always planning and enacting the same ingenious crime. Always vanishing at the end of the night.

Worse, he’s not someone I observe from a distance. The dream is light-years beyond lucid. If it wasn’t so intriguing, I’d call it a nightmare. For in my dreams I
am
him—Marc Simona, a nineteen-year-old parking attendant at a famous Hollywood theater. I see through his eyes, I think his thoughts. Indeed, I know everything there is to know about him.

Except why he haunts me.

My name is Jessica Ralle and I’m a witch. I’ve explained all this before. How I traveled to Las Vegas with my friends the weekend after I graduated high school. How I was initiated into the ancient game of red queen. How I died and was reborn in the mysterious realm known as witch world.

Last time, I told my story as if it happened in the past, which it did. But this time I’ll tell it like it’s happening now. I have my reasons, and by the time I finish this tale they will be obvious.

I had been a witch for only a month when I began to dream of Marc. At first I told no one about him. I mean, I couldn’t tell James Kelter, my boyfriend, that my unconscious was obsessing over another guy. And since I couldn’t even see Jimmy anymore in the real world—but only when he and I were awake together in witch world—he was jealous enough about what I was doing with the other half of my life. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust me. He was just . . . well, human. Hell, had the situation been reversed, I would have been none too happy.

At the same time, I was hesitant to confide in my best friend, Alex Simms. Although Alex had the genetic potential to become a witch—or to be “connected,” as they called it in witch world—she had yet to go through the initiatory rite of dying and being revived—a process that usually triggered an awareness of the other world in people who had the right genetic makeup. Alex said she wasn’t afraid but we both knew that wasn’t true. I didn’t blame her. I wouldn’t have volunteered to die. Who would? The only way I became a witch was because I was forced into it.

Yet I was still hoping Alex would one day join me and become a witch, and for that reason I kept my mouth shut about Marc. I didn’t want to give her another reason to be scared.

Why I hesitated to tell my father about the dreams, though, I wasn’t sure. It could have been because he’d only been back in my life for a month when I began to have them. Or else it was because he’d never spoken about having a similar experience. As far as I knew, seeing through the eyes of another person while you were asleep was not a “standard” witch power. Whatever, my father still intimidated me and I didn’t see him that often. Plus I wasn’t the kind of person who talked about personal stuff on the phone. I was paranoid that way. I always felt like someone was listening.

So I was alone with my dreams, alone with Marc every night when I closed my eyes and fell asleep. Like I said, I felt I was inside him, that I actually
was
him. It was weird; it was disturbing and yet there was something seductive about it as well. Marc. I was pretty sure he wasn’t a witch, but he was a fascinating character. . . .

CHAPTER ONE

PREMIERE NIGHT AT GRAUMAN’S CHINESE
Theatre. Roll out the red carpet and prepare to welcome the hordes of beautiful people in their Mercedes S-Class sedans, Jaguar convertibles, Beamers, and Bentleys—and a bevy of other cars worth more than most U.S. homes.

Because he was a parking attendant for Grauman’s—now legally the TCL Chinese Theatre, a name no one in Hollywood was even aware of—the majority of people his age would have assumed Marc Simona loved riding in such cars. The truth was he didn’t. He just parked them, usually drove them less than two hundred yards. He never got to feel how they handled on the open road, and besides, even if he’d been given a chance to drive a sports car up the California coast, he wouldn’t have cared. The only thing that mattered to him was how much trunk space each vehicle had.

The space was what mattered.

That and what kind of jewelry the owners of the cars—specifically the ladies—wore to the red-carpet events. Because Marc didn’t park the cars for tips. Being a valet was just a role he played so he’d know which trunk to climb into at the end of the night.

Most people would have called Marc a thief.

He liked to think of himself as a professional.

Either way he was raking in huge bucks.

During his last trip to New York City and its famous Diamond District—he’d driven cross-country all by himself, in three days no less—he’d fenced a pair of sapphire earrings studded with diamonds and netted twenty grand in cash. The gaudy blue stones had been five carats each, and the lonely eared woman he’d swiped them from had also been wearing a gold bracelet laced with rubies that he’d sold for another ten thousand.

It amazed him that the vast majority of celebrities had no taste. He was something of an expert on the subject. He’d seen with his own eyes how difficult it was, if not impossible, for a certain category of rich or famous women to resist the temptation to drape themselves in the bulk of their jewelry box while attending a red-carpet event.

For Marc that group was easy to spot: female stars who were a few too many years past the cursed number forty, and whose phone had stopped ringing; or else trophy wives who had visited their plastic surgeons one too many times to suction off fat that would have better been shed with diet and exercise. Either group was, to Marc, the equivalent of walking pawnshops.

“Scratch it and you’re dead,” a producer snapped at Marc as he handed over the keys to a black Mercedes sports coupe, while another parking attendant helped the man’s wife out through the passenger door.

Marc recognized the guy—Barry Hazen, executive producer on tonight’s film. By all rights Hazen should have been the man of the hour. Yet Marc knew—as did anyone remotely connected to the business—that Hazen had not worked on the film at all. The guy was filthy rich. He and his partners owned a medium-size production company. All he did was write checks. He never made creative decisions. Yet, with his cash, he was able to put his name on films he probably couldn’t even follow.

That was fine with Marc. Because even though Mr. Hazen was sixty years old with snow-white hair and an Armani tux, Mrs. Hazen was a thirty-year-old redhead wearing a diamond necklace with a central rock the size of a golf ball. It was so big it must have started forming back when the dinosaurs walked the earth. Marc could only dream what he could hock it for.

Marc smiled as he took the man’s keys. “Have no fear, Mr. Hazen. I know a secret spot I can stow this baby where God himself couldn’t touch it.”

Mr. Hazen nodded his approval. “We’ll be here late. Stay behind and pick it up for me and I’ll make it worth your while.”

“Absolutely,” Marc said. He always stayed late for the after-picture party so he could prey on that one couple he’d select who would return home so tired and drunk that they’d fall into bed the instant they entered their house. But whoever that couple turned out to be—so far the Hazens looked good, but Marc knew he’d have several candidates before the night was over—he’d have to clock out before they returned for their car.

Why? The answer was simple. He had to be finished with his work so he could ride home with the couple in their trunk.

Marc hopped in the car and headed straight for Hollywood Boulevard without bothering to check the back, tearing around the block. Grauman’s had been built ages ago, in the era of black-and-white films, and its parking lot could accommodate only a fraction of the valet traffic. Nowadays the best place to stow a Mercedes was in the mall next door. It had a ten-level parking structure and from experience Marc knew how early the bottom level emptied. It was perfect; it gave him more than enough privacy to keep up his lucrative side job.

He stashed Hazen’s sports car in a spot he reserved for his most promising candidates. Besides being physically isolated, it was outside the range of any security cameras and had a seldom-used janitor’s closet where he could store the tools of his trade and work without being interrupted.

Marc hurried to that closet and locked the door behind him. From a box hidden in the corner beneath a filthy sink, he took out a flat, two-inch-square steel case loaded with putty. Separating the Mercedes’s key from the rest of Hazen’s keys, he placed it inside the case and pressed the top shut.

Making the impression of the key was easy—the remainder of the process took patience and skill. Opening the case and removing the key, he reached for a tube of oily brown goo that could best be described as “plaster-glue,” and squeezed it into the impression.

Marc didn’t know the exact chemical makeup of the material, nor did he care. All that mattered was that it dried fast and hard, which it did when heated. That was its only drawback and the main reason why it wasn’t as easy to duplicate keys as most people thought. To speed up the process he kept a battery-powered heater running in the janitor’s closet. He kept extra cases on hand as well. There were nights he’d go through a dozen of them and prepare a dozen spare keys.

Yet in the end he’d use only one key and sneak into only one house—if he was lucky. A lot of factors had to come together for his plan to work. So far, after a year of parking celebrity cars and working over twenty red-carpet events, he’d managed to slip into only seven homes. And out of those seven he’d only struck gold four times.

Of course, the gold had been attached to jewels . . . so he couldn’t complain.

Marc finished applying the plaster and again closed his steel case and held the top tight for a minute without moving an inch. Then, after opening it and leaving the case and the key atop the heater to dry, he cleaned Mr. Hazen’s original key with a paper towel soaked in alcohol and bleach. Whenever he managed to steal something beautiful and expensive, he knew there was no easier way for the police to trace the crime back to him than if he left even the tiniest residue of putty on the original car key.

Since Hazen was his first candidate of the night, Marc was out of practice and it took longer than usual before he was able to exit the janitor’s closet—six whole minutes. The process should have taken him half that time.

Damn,
he thought. His boss, Steve Green—a rough-voiced ex-sailor from Australia and the head of the valet parking—was going to wonder what was taking him so long.

Yet when Marc finally did leave the janitor’s closet, he did so without the fake key in hand. From practice, he knew it was best to let it dry on the heater for at least twenty minutes. The hotter it got, the harder it got.

When Marc got back to the theater, his boss did in fact ask where the hell he’d been. “Got caught behind a couple of cop cars while swinging around the block,” Marc lied.

“Did they stop you?”

“Almost. I was speeding.”

Green grinned his approval. He was famous for taking Jags and Porsches out for a spin during the downtime in the middle of the movie.

Marc grinned along with his boss but cringed inside. The fact Green had noticed the delay was not good. It was reason enough to cross the Hazens off his list of candidates.