Charming

Book 0: Pax Arcana

by Elliott James

Genres: Contemporary Fantasy; Fantasy Romance; Urban Fantasy

Synopsis

John Charming isn't your average prince...

He comes from a line of Charmings—an illustrious family of dragon slayers, witch-finders and killers dating back to before the fall of Rome. Trained by a modern day version of the Knights Templar, monster hunters who have updated their methods from chain mail and crossbows to Kevlar and shotguns, John Charming was one of the best—until a curse made him one of the abominations the Knights were sworn to hunt.

That was a lifetime ago. Now John tends bar under an assumed name in rural Virginia and leads a peaceful, quiet life. That is, until a vampire and a blonde walked into his bar...

Release date: September 24, 2013

Publisher: Orbit

Print pages: 400

Sample

Once upon a time, she smelled wrong. Well, no, that’s not exactly true. She smelled clean, like fresh snow and air after a lightning storm and something hard to identify, something like sex and butter pecan ice cream. Honestly, I think she was the best thing I’d ever smelled. I was inferring “wrongness” from the fact that she wasn’t entirely human.

I later found out that her name was Sig.

Sig stood there in the doorway of the bar with the wind behind her, and there was something both earthy and unearthly about her. Standing at least six feet tall in running shoes, she had shoulders as broad as a professional swimmer’s, sinewy arms, and well-rounded hips that were curvy and compact. All in all, she was as buxom, blonde, blue-eyed, and clear-skinned as any woman who had ever posed for a Swedish tourism ad.

And I wanted her out of the bar, fast.

You have to understand, Rigby’s is not the kind of place where goddesses were meant to walk among mortals. It is a small, modest establishment eking out a fragile existence at the tail end of Clayburg’s main street. The owner, David Suggs, had wanted a quaint pub, but instead of decorating the place with dartboards or Scottish coats of arms or ceramic mugs, he had decided to celebrate southwest Virginia culture and covered the walls with rusty old railroad equipment and farming tools.

When I asked why a bar—excuse me, I mean pub—with a Celtic name didn’t have a Celtic atmosphere, Dave said that he had named Rigby’s after a Beatles song about lonely people needing a place to belong.

“Names have power,” Dave had gone on to inform me, and I had listened gravely as if this were a revelation.

Speaking of names, “John Charming” is not what it reads on my current driver’s license. In fact, about the only thing accurate on my current license is the part where it says that I’m black-haired and blue-eyed. I’m six foot one instead of six foot two and about seventy-five pounds lighter than the 250 pounds indicated on my identification. But I do kind of look the way the man pictured on my license might look if Trevor A. Barnes had lost that much weight and cut his hair short and shaved off his beard. Oh, and if he were still alive.

And no, I didn’t kill the man whose identity I had assumed, in case you’re wondering. Well, not the first time anyway.

Anyhow, I had recently been forced to leave Alaska and start a new life of my own, and in David Suggs I had found an employer who wasn’t going to be too thorough with his background checks. My current goal was to work for Dave for at least one fiscal year and not draw any attention to myself.

Which was why I was not happy to see the blonde.

For her part, the blonde didn’t seem too happy to see me either. Sig focused on me immediately. People always gave me a quick flickering glance when they walked into the bar—excuse me, the pub—but the first thing they really checked out was the clientele. Their eyes were sometimes predatory, sometimes cautious, sometimes hopeful, often tired, but they only returned to me after being disappointed. Sig’s gaze, however, centered on me like the oncoming lights of a train—assuming train lights have slight bags underneath them and make you want to flex surreptitiously. Those same startlingly blue eyes widened, and her body went still for a moment.

Whatever had triggered her alarms, Sig hesitated, visibly debating whether to approach and talk to me. She didn’t hesitate for long, though—I got the impression that she rarely hesitated for long—and chose to go find herself a table.

Now, it was a Thursday night in April, and Rigby’s was not empty. Clayburg is host to a small private college named Stillwaters University, one of those places where parents pay more money than they should to get an education for children with mediocre high school records, and underachievers with upper-middle-class parents tend to do a lot of heavy drinking. This is why Rigby’s manages to stay in business. Small bars with farming implements on the walls don’t really draw huge college crowds, but the more popular bars tend to stay packed, and Rigby’s does attract an odd combination of local rednecks and students with a sense of irony. So when a striking six-foot blonde who wasn’t an obvious transvestite sat down in the middle of the bar, there were people around to notice.

Even Sandra, a nineteen-year-old waitress who considers customers an unwelcome distraction from covert texting, noticed the newcomer. She walked up to Sig promptly instead of making Renee, an older waitress and Rigby’s de facto manager, chide her into action.

For the next hour I pretended to ignore the new arrival while focusing on her intently. I listened in—my hearing is as well developed as my sense of smell—while several patrons tried to introduce themselves. Sig seemed to have a knack for knowing how to discourage each would-be player as fast as possible.

She told suitors that she wanted to be up-front about her sex change operation because she was tired of having it cause problems when her lovers found out later, or she told them that she liked only black men, or young men, or older men who made more than seventy thousand dollars a year. She told them that what really turned her on was men who were willing to have sex with other men while she watched. She mentioned one man’s wife by name, and when the weedy-looking grad student doing a John Lennon impersonation tried the sensitive-poet approach, she challenged him to an arm-wrestling contest. He stared at her, sitting there exuding athleticism, confidence, and health—three things he was noticeably lacking—and chose to be offended rather than take her up on it.

There was at least one woman who seemed interested in Sig as well, a cute sandy-haired college student who was tall and willowy, but when it comes to picking up strangers, women are generally less likely to go on a kamikaze mission than men. The young woman kept looking over at Sig’s table, hoping to establish some kind of meaningful eye contact, but Sig wasn’t making any.

Sig wasn’t looking at me either, but she held herself at an angle that kept me in her peripheral vision at all times.

For my part, I spent the time between drink orders trying to figure out exactly what Sig was. She definitely wasn’t undead. She wasn’t a half-blood Fae either, though her scent wasn’t entirely dissimilar. Elf smell isn’t something you forget, sweet and decadent, with a hint of honey blossom and distant ocean. There aren’t any full-blooded Fae left, of course—they packed their bags and went back to Fairyland a long time ago—but don’t mention that to any of the mixed human descendants that the elves left behind. Elvish half-breeds tend to be somewhat sensitive on that particular subject. They can be real bastards about being bastards.

I would have been tempted to think that Sig was an angel, except that I’ve never heard of anyone I’d trust ever actually seeing a real angel. God is as much an article of faith in my world as he, she, we, they, or it is in yours.

Stumped, I tried to approach the problem by figuring out what Sig was doing there. She didn’t seem to enjoy the ginger ale she had ordered—didn’t seem to notice it at all, just sipped from it perfunctorily. There was something wary and expectant about her body language, and she had positioned herself so that she was in full view of the front door. She could have just been meeting someone, but I had a feeling that she was looking for someone or something specific by using herself as bait… but as to what and why and to what end, I had no idea. Sex, food, or revenge seemed the most likely choices.

I was still mulling that over when the vampire walked in.

This is how the Pax Arcana works: if one night you couldn’t sleep and wound up looking out your window at three in the morning, and your next-door neighbor was changing into a wolf right beneath you… you wouldn’t see it. Don’t get me wrong, the image would be refracted on a beam of light and enter your optic nerves and everything, but you would go on with your life without really registering that you’d seen a werewolf any more than you noticed or remembered a particular leaf on a tree that you’d seen that morning. Technically seen anyway.

This is not a dramatic spell… it is simply an extension of how the human mind already works. If our brains didn’t dump most of the massive amounts of sensory information that they take in every second, they wouldn’t be able to function. We wouldn’t be able to distinguish the present from the past, and our brains would overload like crashing computers.

This is why you occasionally see something strange or disconcerting in the corner of your eye, but when you whirl around, there’s nothing there. The reason these experiences are so unsettling is that what you’re really experiencing is an afterimage. Something you saw five seconds or five minutes or five days ago, without really registering it, was so disturbing that once the danger was gone, the subconscious memory briefly fought off the effects of the Pax Arcana and resurfaced like a drowning person breaking water… before getting pulled under again.

But just suppose that you looked out your window and did register the werewolf. Let’s imagine that you are unusually sensitive, or you have a head injury, or a dog attack traumatized you as a small child. For whatever reason, assume something went wrong with the spell, and you actually saw the werewolf even though it wasn’t directly threatening you. Such incidents are rare, but they do happen.

Ask yourself this question: if you actually did notice your neighbor changing into a wolf, would you believe what you were seeing with your own two eyes? Seriously? I don’t think you would.

I think you’d imagine you were having a lucid dream. Or you’d think your neighbor was playing some kind of elaborate prank with high-tech special effects. You might come up with increasingly far-fetched and paranoid theories about how drugs got into your system. Lacking a more rational explanation, you might even become convinced that you were losing your mind. Perhaps you might go to a therapist later or attempt to self-medicate. Most likely, you’d go back to your normal life the next day and wait cautiously for any further signs of mental breakdown, and as long as nothing else happened, you wouldn’t say anything about it. To anyone. Ever.

Be honest. Am I wrong?

There are tens of thousands of people, all around you, maybe hundreds of thousands, who at some point have experienced something that they can’t explain. And these people are silent. They are ashamed. They are afraid. They are convinced that they are the only ones, and so they say nothing. That is the real reason the Pax Arcana is so powerful. Rationality is king, and your emperor isn’t wearing any clothes.

The vampire didn’t walk into the bar so much as flow. Like water. Like night. He was wearing a tight black T-shirt and dark jeans over muscles that seemed to have been sculpted from ivory. His hair was black and tousled, framing piercing green eyes that burned with banked passion in spite of the cold smile on his cruel slash of a mouth.

OK, just kidding. Sorry. That whole thing about vampires being übersexy Euro-trash? It’s a myth. Vampires project a low-level mental command called a glamour that makes any mortal who meets them see them in the most attractive light possible. Personally, I’m immune to this kind of glamour—it’s part of what I am. When I look at vampires, I see what’s really there: walking corpses with pale white skin the color and texture of worm flesh, lank greasy hair, bad teeth, and breath that smells like a butcher shop.

Popular young adult novels notwithstanding, vampires only sparkle when they burn.

This particular vampire was wearing a T-shirt that was green, not black, and it was faded. There were indeterminate stains on the shirt where bleach had been applied to something that didn’t want to come out—I’m assuming blood, although I might be stereotyping. His jeans were blue and showed signs of wear in the usual places, and like a lot of vampires he had shaved his skull completely bald. Unwashed hair gets grody fast, and most vampires have an innate phobia about being submerged in running water—anything even remotely symbolic of baptism or birth makes them extremely uncomfortable. Only the strongest-willed vampires force themselves to clean up regularly, and I could smell that this guy wasn’t one of them. His eyes were close-set and his nose was bony, and they looked out of place on a face as broad as his was, as if his features had been pinched by a giant index finger and thumb.

What was really disturbing about the vampire was that those same eyes were bloodshot, his fangs were bared, and he was radiating hostility. He was so beyond normal, in fact, that he actually triggered the Pax Arcana.

Which was why no one was paying any real attention to him at all, at least not on a surface level. A few people who were texting frowned as the spell surge disrupted their signals, but that was about it. That’s one of the things that sucks about magic: it moves molecules around; and when molecules move, electrons shift; and when electrons shift, the air becomes electromagnetically charged. This is why all of those reality shows about ghost hunters basically amount to a bunch of guys with science degrees getting excited while they talk about energy readings, and you’re just sitting there bored watching a TV screen fill up with fuzz and static before the cameras go off-line.

This is also where all those old expressions like hair-raising and spine-tingling come from. They were coined centuries ago by people who didn’t have the scientific terminology to describe air saturated with a low-level electrical charge.

Anyhow, the reason the vampire’s behavior was self-destructive was that the Pax Arcana may be powerful, but it has limits. All acts of magic require energy, and if every supernatural creature on the planet behaved the way this vampire was behaving, the Pax would become overtaxed. Or, I suppose, overPaxed.

If the vampire persisted in this kind of reckless behavior, he was eventually going to attract the attention of a knight, or a supernatural being who didn’t want his or her or its way of life disrupted. Some supernatural being like… the blonde.

Which is why I said, “Oh shit.” I had finally figured out what Sig was doing there.

Being a vampire, he heard me curse even though it was under my breath and across a bar. Being a vampire, a species that’s only slightly less territorial than junkyard dogs or evil stepmothers, he took it as a challenge. And, being a vampire, he stopped staring at Sig and looked at me.

Being me, I returned the look. I didn’t put anything overt into it, but just the fact that he could tell I was really looking back at him was significant. I held his gaze and let my body go completely still, which all animals recognize as a sign that someone is ready to either fight or flee… and I wasn’t going anywhere.

I’m kind of territorial myself. Granted, it wasn’t my bar, but I was tending it. I was tending the hell out of it. And I wanted the vampire and the blonde to take it somewhere else, and fast.

He walked toward me, not stopping until he was at the bar directly across from me. “Give me whatever you have on draft,” he rasped. Of course, he wasn’t really ordering a beer. Vampires can eat or drink normal food, but they can’t metabolize it, which means one way or another their bodies later wind up expelling their food or drink undigested.

No, when the vampire demanded I serve him, he was establishing a pecking order. Me badass. You Jane.

“Smell me,” I invited quietly.

This guy was a newbie. For a second he thought this was some strange kind of insult, but he still hadn’t gotten a good whiff of me, and when he realized that, his nostrils dilated. A vampire’s sense of smell isn’t as good as mine—he still hadn’t smelled the blonde yet—but it’s close.

“What the hell kind of a thrope are you?” he asked.

In the supernatural community—if you can call such a scattered and mismatched assortment of predators, refugees, and outcasts a community—thrope is a catchall phrase for beings who are humanoid but can change into another form.

What the vampire was saying was that he’d never smelled anybody exactly like me before, but he was pretty sure that I changed into something else. He wasn’t right, but he wasn’t wrong either. I’m complicated.

“All you need to know is that you’re not welcome here,” I said evenly.

By the way, that whole thing about vampires needing to be invited into a place? That was only true centuries ago when even peasant huts were routinely blessed by the village priest. Nowadays, the only sincere prayer being uttered over most buildings is the one where their contractor hopes a hurricane won’t expose the safety shortcuts he took to lower his construction bid. And that rule never applied to bars anyhow, except in cultures where beer halls were sacred.

But if my comment didn’t cause the vampire to be magically bull-rushed out of Rigby’s, it still threw him a little.

“Go suck somewhere else,” I added.

The vampire snarled and threw a right punch that was almost fast enough to break the sound barrier. It was definitely powerful enough to break a brick wall or my jaw. I knew from experience that the vampire was stronger than I was, so I didn’t try to catch his fist in my palm like they do in the movies; instead, I grabbed his wrist while it was still moving and stepped back, adding my weight and muscle to his. He was surging forward, so it was easy to use his own momentum to yank him in the direction he was already going and pull him off the balls of his feet.

I took advantage of his momentary loss of balance and kept guiding him until his midriff smacked into the bar and his feet scrambled for purchase. I snaked my fingers around the broad base of his right thumb and twisted his entire hand in a quick, sharp, and painful movement that locked his right arm and lifted him farther off of his feet as I continued to guide him over the bar top. The tips of his toes were now off the floor so that they couldn’t give him any leverage. He couldn’t get at me with his left hand without breaking the right arm that I was now hiding behind, holding it twisted and hyper-flexed from above. Breaking your own arm takes a certain amount of willpower and leverage, whether you regenerate or not. Vampires don’t have much of a nervous system left—it takes a pretty big jolt to make them feel pain or pleasure—but every half-remembered reflex and instinct their bodies still have makes their muscles tense and fight them when they attempt self-harm.

Showing my teeth, which were standard human size, by the way, I moved my face closer down to his. “If you push this, I’ll end you and to hell with the consequences.”

The vampire and I had both moved faster than was humanly possible, and because the Pax was already in play, none of the normal customers were noticing anything although some of them would be having nightmares and odd shivers and twitches for the next few days. The blonde was watching us, and she seemed both outraged and stunned, but she stayed seated. Even among supernaturals—hell, especially among supernaturals—there are rules: rules about hospitality, rules about mating, rules about territory, rules about oath-taking, and rules about oath-breaking. One of the most basic rules is that you don’t step into the middle of someone else’s fight.

As for the fight itself, people who specialize in Brazilian jujitsu or aikido will talk about different kinds of submission locks and choke holds and so on, but I generally don’t try to immobilize anyone who’s truly dangerous for longer than it takes to disable or kill them. I released the vampire’s hand and shoved him off the bar in the same motion. He traveled a few feet but quickly regained his footing with insect grace. We locked stares again, and he attempted to hypnotize me. I could tell because I got a little itch right behind my forehead.

The vampire’s bloodshot eyes widened when he realized that his mental compulsion wasn’t going to work, and my hand came up from behind the bar holding the baseball bat Dave keeps there. He wasn’t wearing a bulletproof vest the way a lot of your more savvy vampires started doing after they became available online; one quick smack against the side of the bar and the bat would do for a stake. It was only a few nights until a full moon, and my heart was pumping blood and adrenaline through my body several times faster than a normal human’s; God help me, I wanted him to try something.

But the vampire wavered, smelling something new that made him hesitate, probably the blonde. His nostrils puckered, his body stiffened, and then he took a step back, physically and symbolically.

“Get your hunger under control,” I whispered, knowing he would hear me. “Figure out a way to get what you need, but if I hear about any strange deaths in the next few days, I will find you.”

He abruptly turned and walked toward the restrooms at the side of the bar. Becoming supernatural doesn’t magically make you braver in the face of danger—it just means that there are fewer things that are dangerous to face. Vampires don’t have any moral qualms about coming back with friends if they meet someone powerful enough to be a threat either, but vampires don’t often have friends. They sometimes have hive mates, but even then they’re hesitant to ask those hive mates for help because vampires are very image-conscious and cruel to one another. I doubted that someone like Baldy had any hive mates in any case.

I was wrong, of course.

The blonde sprang to her feet and moved to follow the vampire.

“You. Vampire Hunter Barbie. Hold it.” I pitched my voice so that she could hear me even with normal human hearing, but nobody else could.

Sig adjusted her path and stalked toward the bar, moving at an angle that put me between her and the direction the vampire was moving in. When she spoke, her voice was low and strained. “You still have a chance to avoid getting tangled up in this. I suggest you take it.”

“I don’t care what you do,” I assured her. “Just do it away from my bar.”

Sig gave me her full attention. I didn’t know it then, but she always became calmest at the prospect of imminent violence, a kind of awful and solemn calm that didn’t fool anyone. Her eyes became large and serious, her voice soft. “And how are you going to stop me?”

“You just have normal human hearing, don’t you?” I asked.

“Why?” she asked suspiciously.

“Because,” I said, “I’ve already stopped you.”

The bathrooms had windows facing out on a side alley, and vampires move fast.

With a curse, the blonde rushed toward the restrooms, shooting me a look that left blister marks. I raised my hand and sarcastically waggled my fingers at her. Goodbye, whatever you are. Forget to write. Nice ass.

Wait… did I write that last part out loud?

As soon as it was clear that the blonde wasn’t coming back, I scrounged behind the bar counter until I found a bottle of olive oil. Just to be safe, I sprayed myself a glass of water and then dribbled a drop of olive oil into it. The drop floated there on the surface of the water just the way it was supposed to. She hadn’t really tried to give me the evil eye after all, at least not literally.

You can’t be too careful.

There were some very good reasons to be concerned when Sig stormed back into the pub ten minutes later, from the murderous frustration written all over her face to the fact that I still didn’t know what she was or even what her name was yet. Another excellent cause for anxiety was that Sig had discarded her ignore-the-bartender policy and was headed straight for the countertop I was working behind. But the main reason I should have been worried was that I wasn’t worried. When I saw her, my chest felt inexplicably lighter. I’m a little stubborn about some things, and it was only then that I admitted to myself that I had been hoping to see her again, common sense to the contrary.

A few people had come to sit at the bar while the blonde was gone, so I slid farther down to a spot where we could talk with some degree of privacy. This also put me closer to the special knife I keep hidden behind the bar. I grabbed a pot of coffee so that I could throw hot liquid into her eyes and dive for the knife if she tried anything.

“Can I help you?” I asked, reaching for a mug—I had to have some excuse for the coffeepot.

The blonde made a noise from the depths of her throat that was hard to identify. It was half a growl and half something that sounded like “You’d better be right.”

I didn’t see a Bluetooth device or a cell phone. On the other hand, talking to invisible people isn’t necessarily a sign of insanity in my world.

Sig didn’t sit down. Instead, she rested her fingertips on the edge of the bar that separated us and stood on the balls of her feet so that she could vault over or push herself off the counter as quickly as possible. Forgoing any social pleasantries she said, “If a woman dies tonight, I’m holding you personally responsible.”

I thought this over while I poured coffee into the mug and slowly slid it over to her. “Millions of women die every night,” I pointed out. “You’re not giving me very good odds. Cream or sugar?”

She had a very expressive face, and I watched her consider doing something violent with the coffee cup, then watched her wrestle the anger down and decide to try to communicate again. It was a close call. “Both,” she finally said grudgingly.

I provided her with the cream and sugar. When I was growing up, me and the other squires—aspiring tough guys each and every one of us—used to call any coffee that wasn’t black commie coffee. But that was back when everybody liked Ike and loved Lucy. God knows what we would have called decaf. “I take it you lost him,” I said.

The knives her eyes were throwing at me became chain saws. “He. Is. A. Vampire.” Her teeth were clenched.

She had a point. “I know,” I said.

“You also knew that he was heat seeking!” she accused in a low, throttled voice. “And you let him go.”

In answer, I pointed to the white dry-erase board that nobody ever reads. I had known that either she or the vampire might return, and I had taken a red marker and hastily scrawled the words NO SOULS, NO SERVICE upon it.

Sig closed her eyes and took a deep breath. I struggled heroically not to steal a glance at her chest. Like all heroic struggles, it was a losing battle against overwhelming forces.

Her eyes were still angry when they opened again. “You’re not being charming,” she said, and I tried not to give any sense that my blood had just gone cold. Had her use of my name been an accident? “You sent a vampire off to find a new hunting ground!”

“No,” I said without inflection as I erased the red marker with a swipe of a bar rag. “Vampires don’t have to kill to feed. I reminded him that there were risks involved with the kind of choices he was making.”

“People in this area have gone missing recently,” she informed me. “All female.”

“It hasn’t been in the paper,” I said.

“The Tablet?” she exclaimed derisively. This was the name of Clayburg’s local rag, and again, she had a point. I’ve moved around enough to know that there are two kinds of small-town papers—the ones that aspire to be bigger than they are and aggressively report on local news as if every house fire and high school game were a matter of national importance, and the ones that are little more than brochures designed to attract tourists and textile companies. Despite Clayburg’s being a college town, the Tablet was of the latter variety.

“The police haven’t said anything either,” I pointed out. “When they start making public warnings, bars are right up there with schools, churches, and hotels on their visiting list.”

She looked at me more carefully.

“That’s right,” I said. “I’m pretty and smart.”

Her lips pressed together even more tightly. I couldn’t tell if I’d annoyed her further or almost amused her. I’m not sure she knew.

“These aren’t the kind of women who have a stable lifestyle,” she said by way of an answer. “They’re the kind who move from loser to loser or pimp to pusher because they don’t have steady jobs and their kids are in foster homes. The ones who have been kicked out of their families and are hard to contact because their names aren’t on any rent leases and they keep changing their phone service instead of paying their bills.”

“Then how do you know they’re missing at all if the police aren’t taking it seriously?” I asked.

“I’ve seen their ghosts wandering around town,” Sig said simply, and for a moment she looked sick. Something I didn’t have a name for seemed to drain out of her then. There’s a reason we refer to having bad memories as being haunted. “They all died recently, naked, with their throats ripped out.”

I nodded soberly. I won’t lie, a part of my mind was busy running through a list called “Clues to What the Blonde Is” and checking a box that said “Sees dead people”—but I was genuinely disturbed by her words.

The thing about the wome. . .