Free Hard Day's Knight by John G Hartness Page A

all-American 21st-century school, a sprawling brick building with a cute little portico in front for parents to deposit their over-privileged spawn under so the little snot factories didn’t get a drop of rain on their little heads. Yeah, I might have a little class prejudice going on.

    I poked around the campus for about half an hour or so, trying to see anything out of the ordinary and failing spectacularly. I don’t have any kind of special magic-detecting sense, and there weren’t any huge pentagrams drawn on the roof of the building or anything like that. I don’t really know what I was looking for, but I found a whole pile of nothing and was getting ready to head back to the main road and see about finding a cab or unsuspecting solo driver when inspiration struck.

    I whipped out the new phone Greg had given me and dialed him up. He answered after the second ring. “Hey, come get me, bro.”

    “Where are you?”

    “Ballantyne Elementary, down south.”

    “What are you doing, looking for a date?”

    “Classy. Just come get me, I’ll explain on the way home.”

    “Alright. It’ll take me like half an hour to get there, so sit tight.”

    “Will do.” I hung up the phone and sat on the roof of the portico to wait. About twenty minutes passed before headlights turned into the drive. I stood up on the roof and started to wave when I realized that the headlights didn’t belong to Greg’s car, or to mine. I dropped flat to the roof as the police cruiser pulled into the drive and parked in front of the school.

    Great, I thought to myself. I pick the one school in the district with enough money for motion sensors on the roof. I laid there as still as I could while the cop got out of the cruiser and did a lap around the building, shining his flashlight into the windows and generally looking like a cop doing a routine patrol. I grabbed my phone and shot Greg a quick “stay away, cops are here” text before switching the phone to silent and returning it to my pocket.

    After two laps the cop got back in his car and just sat there. He left the dome light off, but I could see him fingering a picture in his sun visor. He sat there for a long few minutes before driving off. I texted Greg, and he picked me up a couple minutes later.

    “Alright,” he said. “Tell me again why I had to drive all the way out here to get your sorry butt.”

    “Because there aren’t any buses to Ballantyne at two in the morning and I didn’t want to steal any more cars this week.”

    “Fair enough. Hey! What do you mean steal
any more
cars? I thought we agreed that we were the good guys?”

    “Dude, stealing a car and giving it back doesn’t make me a bad guy. And I did give it back.” I was really hoping he would just drop it. He didn’t.

    “And what about the driver? And don’t bother lying, you know you suck at it.” He’s right, too. I can’t lie worth a crap. Even being immortal and bloodless doesn’t mean I can lie looking my best friend in the face.

    “I left him asleep in the back seat behind a biker bar on Central Avenue. He might have felt a little out of place when he woke up, but he’d be safe.” Silently urging him to drop it, he continued to ignore my desires and kept hammering at me.

    “Asleep? Or drained?” He wouldn’t look at me, so I could tell he was really pissed.

    “Asleep. I didn’t drain him.” And I didn’t. I drank a little, but I didn’t drain him. I wasn’t lying. I wasn’t going to tell him the whole truth unless he pulled it out of me with a wrecker, but I wasn’t going to lie, either.

    “But you did feed, didn’t you? Don’t even answer. I can see it in your face. You look healthier than you have in years, so I know you fed on him.” I didn’t know what he was talking about, so I flipped down the sun visor on my side and checked myself out in the mirror.

    He was right; I looked
good
. Well, good for me, anyway. I still had an unruly shock of brown hair