Hard Day's Knight by John G Hartness Read Free Book Online

alpha predator; it’s what we do.

    Greg was waiting for me when I got home, and he was practically bouncing around the apartment, he was so anxious. Apartment is a generous term I suppose. We live in the basement of a caretaker’s house in a local municipal cemetery. Municipal cemeteries work best for our brand of lurking, because they’re not consecrated ground, and we can hang out there. Greg and I keep recycling through as the “caretaker” every dozen years or so, just to keep the folks that own the cemetery from getting suspicious about the fact that we don’t age. We built a basement apartment with a couple of hidden entrances, and outfitted it the way we wanted. The caretaker’s cottage is decorated in vintage redneck, so anyone stopping by gets exactly what they expect to see, without getting in our way.

    I made up some story for the cemetery owners about being an insomniac writer with an online poker addiction, and they leave me alone when I never go outside in the daytime and am up all night. They don’t really care, as long as the graves stay mowed and clean, and I subcontract that work. As long as we don’t charge anything for our “maintenance services,” they don’t charge us anything to live there. It’s a pretty sweet deal, if I do say so myself.

    “Dude, what the hell took you so long? I’ve been going nuts here waiting for you!” He was sitting on the couch racking up an incredibly unimpressive video game score, which was testament to how distracted he was. Greg usually crushes the games, but obviously tonight he was more interested in what I had to tell him.

    “Sorry, had to stop for take-out on the way.” I sat beside him on the couch and picked up the second controller. “What are we playing?”

    Greg was having none of that, and grabbed the controller out of my hands. “No frickin’ way, man! What is the deal, and what are we going to do about that man-eating detective?”

    “I don’t know what the deal is yet, but I’m starting to get the idea that our little demon chasing Tommy is just the tip of the iceberg. And I’m pretty sure that our distractions will keep the detective out of our hair for a little while. Hopefully she’ll be busy chasing after whoever busted up Tommy’s house and jumped out the window of his hospital room long enough for us to get to the bottom of all this.”

    “But I busted up his house, and I guess you broke his hospital window…” Greg trailed off as understanding dawned on him. My partner’s book smart, not street smart but he’s damn loyal, and has super-powers, so I keep him around. Besides, he’s been my best friend since sixth grade. We met getting stuffed into adjacent lockers in gym class. Even then, his was a tight fit.

    “Now you get it. So we need to find out everything we can about these kids that have gone missing. Tommy said there were ten or eleven of them, and that’s why the cops were after him so quickly. You get online and see what you can dig up, and I’m going to go interview the sister of one of the earlier kidnap victims. Then we crash for a little while and try to catch up with Dad early tomorrow night. Sound good?”

    “Works for me. Hey, did you bring any leftovers with you? I’m getting a little peckish.” Greg headed over to his desk, with a brand new Macbook, external monitor setup and a ridiculously large array of external hard drives. Greg’s on a mission to collect every vampire movie ever made, so he’s got bit torrents running 24/7. He uses more bandwidth in a week than most of Nebraska uses in a year, so it’s a damn good thing he figured out how to piggyback onto the network of the bank headquarters down the block.

    “Sorry dude, not even a drop to spare.” And it was true. My donor would probably have felt really crappy when he woke up if I had drank any more. So I wasn’t lying to Greg exactly, just avoiding a repeat of the fight we always have when I drink straight from a human.

    He