Hard Day's Knight by John G Hartness Page A

and my thighs threatened to revolt. Vampire or not, you sit cross-legged on the floor for a few hours and your butt falls asleep. I staggered off to my bedroom and crashed for a few hours while Greg kept going. He’s always been better at homework than me, anyway.

    It wasn’t a very restful sleep, with visions of scared children running from sexy fallen angels dancing through my head while I tried to grab a few hours’ rest. We do sleep, and we dream, and we don’t “die” every morning at sunrise. We can sense the sunrise, it’s kinda like our bodies’ way of warning us not to go outside for fear of becoming a pile of ash, but I’ve been known to pull an all-nighter (or in my case an all-dayer, I guess) when I needed to. I got about six hours of fitful sleep and staggered out to the den to find Greg facedown in the scattered mass of case files.

    I stepped over him as quietly as I could, opened the fridge and grabbed a bottle of orange juice. Since my roomie was asleep I didn’t bother getting a glass, just sat on the couch in my boxers and drank straight from the plastic jug. We can drink, too, anything we want. No food, though. The digestive system stops working except for a liquid diet right after we wake up. So I guess that answers Tommy’s question about vampire poop. We don’t get any nutrients out of anything we drink except blood, but alcohol still works, only to a lesser degree. And if you play your cards right, you can pee in some spectacular colors, because what comes in, goes right back out again. You don’t want to know how we found this out, but let it suffice to say that we were young and learning about our new abilities, and leave it at that.

    “I don’t care if we’re dead, that’s still gross.” I jumped, spilling cold OJ in my lap. Greg hadn’t moved, but I could see his shoulders shaking as he laughed at my frosty crotch.

    “I might be gross, but you’re a dick.” I said, looking around for something to dry off with. I gave up on the idea of finding anything lying around the den when I remembered that Greg had been home alone all night yesterday, which always led to an almost neurotic level of cleaning. I went into my room and got some fresh boxers and the rest of my clothes.

    Greg was sitting up on the floor when I made it back to the den, a look of smug superiority on his face. “What?” I asked.

    “What, what?” He kept grinning at me like a hillbilly with a winning Powerball ticket.

    “What has you sitting there grinning like the AV club president who just bugged the girls’ dressing room?”

    “I
am
the AV club president who bugged the girls’ dressing room,” he reminded me without a hint of embarrassment.

    “I remember, you perv. And you had that same stupid grin on your face then.”

    “Well I think I may have found our link. Career Day.” He waved a piece of paper over his head like it was a checkered flag and he was an off-duty Daytona stripper. I snatched the paper from him and looked at it. There was a column of initials, a column of dates and a column of school names. The school names I recognized, and it didn’t take long to figure out that the initials and dates matched up with missing kids.

    “Greg, there are only seven names here.” I pointed to the paper.

    “Yeah?”

    “There were eleven victims, dude.”

    “Yeah, but seven of these schools had a Career Day the week before the kidnappings occurred. There’s no way that’s not statistically significant.”

    He had a point. “I could see that.”

    “Really?”

    “Yeah, I think it’s a good idea. We need to look into it further.” Greg looked so happy that I wasn’t dismissing his idea out of hand that you’d have thought I gave him an ice cream cone, or a puppy. Or a puppy with ice cream on it.

    “Cool. So now what?” He asked. He headed to the coat closet and started gearing up – putting on his utility belt, boots, and other combat equipment. I stopped him before he got