Daring

Book 2: Pax Arcana

by Elliott James

Genres: Contemporary Fantasy; Fantasy Romance; Urban Fantasy

Synopsis

Something is rotten in the state of Wisconsin. Werewolf packs are being united and absorbed into an army of super soldiers by a mysterious figure who speaks like an angel and fights like a demon. And every Knight Templar-keepers of the magical peace between mankind and magickind-who tries to get close to this big bad wolf winds up dead. No knight can infiltrate a group whose members can smell a human from a mile away . . . no knight except one.



John Charming. Ex knight. Current werewolf. Hunted by the men who trained him, he now might be their only salvation. But animal instincts are rising up to claim John more powerfully than ever before, and he must decide if this new leader of wolves is a madman or a messiah.

Release date: September 23, 2014

Publisher: Orbit

Print pages: 400

Sample

I. One day, your father and mother were hugging, and they began to have special feelings. Warm feelings that tingled in their private places. It is likely they weren’t wearing any clothes. At any rate, they began to rub against each other like two sticks trying to start a fire, and nine months later, you were born. If this is news to you, please put this book down now. There may well be big bad wolves and evil witches and faeries in the pages that follow, but I promise you, this isn’t a children’s story.

II. The supernatural is real.

III. You probably don’t believe me about point #2 because most of the world is under a spell called the Pax Arcana. This enchantment keeps humans from noticing or accepting any evidence of the supernatural that is not an immediate threat to their survival.

IV. The existence of the Pax Arcana is the real legendary secret guarded by the Knights Templar. Not the Holy Grail, not the secret family tree of Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene, not the treasure hoard of King Solomon, not a vast political or corporate conspiracy to ruuulllllle the world. No, it’s the Pax Arcana.

V. Knights are bound to maintain the Pax by a geas, a magical compulsion that passes down from generation to generation like any other family curse. In exchange for being bound, knights enjoy a certain amount of protection against the supernatural; we cannot be compelled, beguiled, or enthralled because we are already compelled, beguiled, and enthralled.

VI. As you might have gathered from that “we,” I was once a knight. I was pretty good at it too, until I came down with a mild case of werewolf. Now I’m one of the monsters being hunted.

VII. My name is John Charming. You know all of those stories about guys called Prince Charming who were going around slaying monsters and rescuing maidens and getting magically cursed left and right? That’s my family you’re reading about, a long line of monster hunters though none of my ancestors were ever actually princes. For that matter, I’m pretty sure that not all of the women they were chasing were actually maidens either.

VIII. I lived on the run and off the grid for a very long time, but while I was hiding in a small southwestern Virginia town called Clayburg, I got caught up in a war between a vampire hive and a small group of monster hunters. Think of the latter as the modern-day equivalent of a mob with torches.

IX. The monster hunters were being led by two psychics: Stanislav Dvornik, an asshat who could see the future, and Sig Norresdotter, a descendant of Valkyries who could see dead people. There was also an Episcopalian priest on mental leave named Molly Newman, an exterminator turned ghost hunter named Chauncy “Choo” Childers, and a cop, Ted Cahill, whose definition of “bad guy” had been considerably expanded in recent years. I got involved because I thought I was rescuing them. In every way that mattered, they rescued me.

X. Sig Norresdotter and I developed feelings for each other. We only spent a short time together, but it was a very intense short time. To give you an idea of how intense, let me add that Stanislav Dvornik didn’t like what was happening between me and Sig, and all of this drama was going on in the middle of an ongoing vampire hunt. There was confusion and lots of screaming and hurt feelings all around. Blood was shed, comrades were betrayed, magazine subscriptions got canceled, somebody ate the chicken salad that somebody else left in the fridge, and when the dust settled, Stanislav was dead. So were the vampires, although I suppose in their case they were dead again. Or for real dead this time.

XI. I left Clayburg, but I was worried about Sig and her small band of vigilantes because I didn’t know how vigorously the knights who were after me might try to question them. I “left” Clayburg, but I kind of didn’t leave Clayburg. I mean, I told everyone I was leaving Clayburg, but I’m very good at skulking. Not sulking. Not stalking. Skulking.

XII. And I know I said this prelude was about ten things, but there’s something else you ought to know: I get things wrong sometimes.

Once upon a time, Chauncy “Choo” Childers made himself a secret lair. He was a monster hunter who had just helped kill a vampire queen, and there were these trained killers from the Knights Templar sniffing around Clayburg, and Choo thought it might be a good time to hole up some place where he would be hard to find for a while. Choo’s new front door was a slab of metal built into the side of an overpass. The overpass used to be near a power plant, but the power plant had moved on a long time ago, so maybe I should call the overpass an overpassed. Or maybe an overpassé. Whatever you call it, the overpass had that feel that dead and deserted places have—even the spray-painted graffiti was faded to the point where it was barely legible, not that it had ever said anything particularly new. I’m here. I’m angry. I’m scared. I’m lonely. Somebody care. What traffic the overpass still got was mostly during commuting hours.

Maybe Choo’s new home sounds a little extreme or paranoid, but I don’t think you can call Choo extremely paranoid. For one thing, he was an exterminator, and cleaning up abandoned and vermin-infested places was second nature to him. For another, vague pronouns really were out to get him.

THEY arrived at dawn. I know, that’s like saying it was a dark and stormy night, but modern-day knights really do like to attack at dawn; it’s early enough to ensure few witnesses, and the rising sun discourages nocturnal predators.

The knights approached in two groups of three. One team emerged from the surrounding woods on the east side. Another team exited from a van that pulled up to the west side of the overpass and stopped. It was a pretty good bet that the knights had blocked access farther down the road from both sides, even if all that meant was putting up phony construction or detour signs. It’s what I would have done, and these were the bastards who trained me. Or their great-grandfathers were.

The trios walked in loose triangle formations, spread out and advancing at a casual pace that was at odds with the alert purpose in their body language. They thought they had a sniper covering them from the woods, but that was no longer true.

Instead, they had me. Me and an M40A1, an old-school Marine sniper rifle. I was getting a good look at them through its scope while the rifle’s original owner slept pacified and ziptied next to me.

From a purely pragmatic point of view, getting involved probably wasn’t a good idea. Choo was only sort of a friend of mine. I liked him but didn’t really know him very well. To be honest, I’m not sure that anyone knew Choo very well. Choo had become aware of the existence of the supernatural after trying to exterminate the wrong damned house, and even when not holing up beneath an overpass, Choo lived alone in a house whose basement was full of stockpiled weapons. Choo’s house was a reflection of the man himself; normal and friendly enough on the surface but full of secrets that had pointy edges and burned.

Maybe that was why we got along.

In any case, I don’t have a lot of friends, and Choo and I had fought together and bled together and watched each other’s backs. If that’s not a close friendship, it’s close enough for me.

Close enough for the Knights Templar too, apparently.

I didn’t know the knights’ exact motives for being there, but I did know that the rifle I had acquired held silver bullets. Maybe my old brethren just wanted to ask Choo some questions since Choo had spent some time around me. Maybe they wanted to ask those questions forcefully. Maybe they wanted to scare Choo and see if he had any way of contacting me, or threaten him on the off chance that I really was stupid enough to stay in the area. Maybe they wanted to take Choo prisoner and see if I would try to free him, or kill him to see if I would try to avenge him. The problem was, the knights were capable of doing any or all of those things. Their geas only prevents knights from killing supernatural beings without good cause. Normal humans are fair game. Or unfair game, for that matter. Humans are a game without rules.

The knights weren’t wearing anything that looked like a standard uniform. They wore light hoodies and thermal shirts and flannel, predominantly in dark colors. Most of them were wearing running shoes and blue jeans, a few of them boots and camouflage clothing. They all wore headgear with brims, either baseball or hunting or painting caps. We were on the outer, more rural rim of Clayburg, and if things went to hell, the knights could scatter and merge into the local population fairly easily.

As soon as they were under the overpass, the knights pulled a variety of weapons out from under their jackets and loose shirts. There would be more sidearms and small blades concealed on their bodies as well. I couldn’t see them, but they were there. It was as sure as gravity. As time passing. As the sun.

“You’re not fooling anyone, Norresdotter.” The knight speaking was on my side of the overpass, and I have very good hearing. He was addressing the lone homeless person sleeping there, a bundle of army surplus clothing.

Sig Norresdotter, also known as the woman I’m carefully avoiding using the word “love” around, emerged from the pile and drew herself up to her full six feet of height and twelve feet of attitude, throwing off an olive green field jacket that was too large for her and pulling off a stocking cap as if it burned. The long shining hair that was her only concession to vanity spilled free. Even in that dim light and from that distance, it looked like liquid gold, like the sun’s rays rippling on the surface of a lake, like… oh hell, I really am in a bad way. I don’t care; she was a flare of brightness in a gray world. Sig also had a long sword sheathed between her shoulder blades and a SIG Sauer holstered at her hip, though she had been smart enough not to draw them. It was possible there was a spear hidden around somewhere too.

Did I mention that Sig was a Valkyrie?

“I’m not here to fool you, Emil,” Sig informed him. “I just don’t want to draw attention from anyone else.”

It’s possible the two of them had some past acquaintance. It’s also possible that Emil was living with one or more ghosts, and that the spirit of some being Emil had killed or loved was chatting in Sig’s ear at that very moment. That kind of thing happens around Sig a lot. Trust me.

Either way, if Emil was unnerved by Sig’s use of his name, he didn’t show any sign of it. “And why are you here, Norresdotter?”

“To stop you from harassing Choo, you assjacket,” Sig said. A bored of course lingered in her tone.

Sig was putting up a good front, but she had been through a lot recently. She had been held prisoner by an undead sociopath and sedated, and that terrified her in a way that death did not, because Sig had some substance abuse issues in her past. There was also the matter of me killing her former lover, although in my defense, he was a complete douche canoe. Oh, and he tried to kill me first. Creatively.

That kind of stuff doesn’t just slide off.

“You must know we are prepared for you, Sig,” Emil chided with a tone that was somehow more threatening for being gentle.

“I am a supernatural being and no threat to the Pax,” Sig reminded him, leaning against the door to Choo’s sanctuary. “Your geas won’t let you harm me without good cause, and you’re not here for a good cause.”

“We don’t have to harm you to get you out of our way,” Emil said. “Not permanently.”

Sig pounded the back of her head against the door as if frustrated, but a moment later she seemed alarmed.

“Choo?” Sig called. Apparently the pounding on the door had been some kind of signal, but nothing was happening and Sig didn’t know why.

I knew why.

The answer was lying open on the ground about ten feet away from me. The bastards had opened a witch bottle. The small brown jug was slightly rounded, glazed with salt, and covered with dag runes. The red wax seal had been broken, and the tip of red thread emerging from the open neck of the bottle told me what kind of creature it had contained: a sprite.

In the old days, sprites were bound by cunning folk and used as scouts, spies, and messengers—think Ariel in The Tempest. Nowadays, though, sprites are more often used to disable perimeter defenses.

Basically, sprites are tourists from another dimension. It takes a lot of energy for them to condense and pull air molecules together into a physical form here, which is why they usually manifest as tiny winged creatures; that size doesn’t take as much energy, and the wings help them get around quickly despite their itsy-bitsy bodies. This is also why sprites disrupt energy transmissions. Sprites can cause security cameras to stop working, cell phones to stop receiving, generators to stutter off, and radio signals to jam. When sent on a specific mission, they can also squeeze into tight cracks and pull wires or snap fan belts or undo nuts and bolts.

Sometimes sprites are referred to as gremlins.

Whatever surprise Choo and Sig had rigged for the knights—and it could have been just about anything from sonics to gases to explosions, because Choo loves his toys—the sprite had made it malfunction.

“My turn,” Emil said, and held up a palm. Then he held up his palm some more. Now it was Emil’s turn to be nonplussed. He was waiting for sniper fire from my position.

So I gave him some.

I’d had plenty of time to line up and sight, so I took an easy shot at a riot gun. The knight holding it was facing me on the far side of the overpass, and the bullet hit the fat butt of the wooden shotgun stock and tore the weapon out of his grasp.

Nobody in the center of the overpass dove for cover, mainly because there was none. Emil remained where he was, his palm still in the air. Then Emil said, in a voice that was distinctly pleased, “He’s here.”

Shit, shit, shit, shit. Shitting shitty shittiness. It wasn’t that I hadn’t expected this. It was that this was exactly what I had expected. Hell, I’d been waiting for this domino to fall since I first allowed myself to develop some relationships again. Which was shit. Shit, shit, shit.

All I can say is, I’d been lonely past the point of being damaged by it. I’d known the smart moves, told myself I would make them, and instead did the opposite because I had gotten to a point where risking death seemed better than not living.

And now it was time to pay the piper. I mean sniper. No, wait… I was… oh, forget it.

“John?!?” Sig said, then yelled, “GET OUT OF HERE!”

Right, like she had everything under control. As if to disprove that very thought, her words became the drop that burst the dam, and all of the tension and contained violence burst loose.

That’s when we found out that we had all greatly underestimated Sig.

That’s when the ghosts came out.

Sig is stronger, faster, and tougher than any normal human, but the thing that really makes Sig a Valkyrie is her ability to communicate with the dead.

You know what they say: if she looks like a Valkyrie, bench-presses small cars like a Valkyrie, and developed feelings for you after having conversations with the ghost of your dead lover like a Valkyrie, she’s probably a Valkyrie.

Wait. Nobody says that?

Anyhow, consider the nature of ghosts and overpasses. Ghosts are spirits who die unfulfilled or in some particularly traumatic fashion, and people who die under overpasses often do so in unpleasant ways. Homeless people looking for shelter from the weather freeze to death in them, or die from ruptured livers, weak hearts, burst appendixes, thrown clots, or any combination of physical breakdowns that are the accumulation of years of loneliness and desperation. People overdose in overpasses. People are dragged into them to be raped or robbed or set on fire for entertainment. There is a reason that there are so many stories about monsters living under bridges, and it’s not just that some of them are true.

Sig had been spending a lot of time in the overpass for the last few days while guarding Choo’s back, and apparently she had been talking a lot. You know. To the dead.

Imagine what it must be like to be a ghost, to be lonely and desperate and stuck in the same place for decade after decade after decade after the best and brightest parts of you have moved on, suffering and never fully understanding why or how to make it stop. Hopefully, you have to imagine very hard. But imagine that after all that time, someone finally comes around who can hear you and is willing to listen.

Now imagine someone attacking that person right in front of you.

A knight hiding in the open van tried to shoot Sig with a rifle similar to the one that I was using, only to discover that the rifle was disassembling, falling to the ground in a rain of metal while some helpful soul field-stripped it. He tried to hold on to the stock—not a rational impulse—and it suddenly stopped resisting and slammed into his face.

Another knight, this one holding a souped-up cattle prod capable of knocking out a buffalo, suddenly had the sensation of falling. He wasn’t actually falling, mind you. The shadow he was casting on the floor was thickening, rising, moving over him and clinging to him like tar.

A knight with another riot shotgun was simply picked up and tossed aside like a bad idea, hurled through the air, and bounced off a concrete wall in a way that made crunching and snapping sounds.

A knight with a sawed-off shotgun discovered that the barrels of his weapon were unaccountably clogged with ice. A moment later, he realized that he could not feel any sensation in the hand holding the sawed-off. When he finally managed to violently fling the weapon away from him, it took most of his hand with it.

Sig doesn’t control the dead, but she knew the overpass was a hotspot, a breeding ground for paranormal infections that she had been treating for days. And the thing about infections is, as they get better, the bad stuff is pushed closer and closer to the surface, where it can be expelled.

The knight with the katana discovered one of the drawbacks of fighting a western blade; katana have no metal guard to protect their owners’ fingers from horizontal strokes—you know, that thin bar that looks like brass knuckles and covers the middle joints of a saber wielder’s hand. This is great when a katana wielder wants to put both hands on a hilt in a blindingly fast and devastating sword strike. It is not so good when he or she is facing someone who is faster than they are and waving a heavy long sword around as if it were a fencing foil.

The katana-wielding knight lost half his fingers. The upper halves. His yell was also cut off, and quickly, by an abnormally strong elbow to his jaw.

I really didn’t see the rest because a mist was manifesting, a swirling fog that somehow looked cold, although I would be hard-pressed to explain why, since it was rising instead of drifting downward. It just didn’t look like a fog that cared a lot about physics. The fog seemed to muffle nearby sounds, but it also seemed to conduct vague and disharmonious noises from some faraway place. I heard laughter, then chanting, then cries. There was definitely a muffled explosion and a lot of yells, but the shouts were from the knights in the overpass, and they sounded a lot more distant than they should have.

Emil was not one of the shouting knights. Emil was walking calmly out of the tunnel and toward me without looking back, speaking clearly and distinctly.

“That explosion was a wall coming down,” Emil explained genially. “Right now, two of us are entering Chauncey Childers’s bolt-hole from an adjacent heating duct.”

This actually made me smile. My hearing was a lot better than Emil’s, and that explosion had been a concussion grenade. Emil’s two knights were trying to break into the lair of a man who had a passion for designing weapons and traps, and it wasn’t going as well as Emil thought. But any momentary flash of satisfaction I felt was wiped out by his next words.

“There’s also a team outside the cabin where your friend Molly Newman is nursing the police detective, Ted Cahill.”

Yeah, I know, I’ve barely mentioned those two. They had gotten into the same fight with a vampire hive that had scarred the rest of us. Ted was either dying or becoming undead, while Molly, the group’s priest, was keeping vigil over him.

“And even if you all escape us today, your friends will never be safe again,” Emil went on relentlessly. “They might win this battle, but we’ll never stop until they’re dead, and there are thousands of us. Thousands of us who know how to use explosives and poisons and long-distance weapons. You know that, I think.”

I really wanted to shoot this asshole.

“Shoot me if you want,” Emil added. “But if you do, your friends start dying. I am offering you a one-time deal. Turn yourself in to me, right now, and we will never bother your friends again unless they do something that violates the Pax. On my honor.”

Sig came walking out of the tunnel behind Emil, her sword held in one hand. Her hair was wild but her eyes were focused. She was staring at the small of Emil’s back as if she could rip the bones out of it by willpower alone.

Behind Sig, the ghosts began to quiet and the fog slowly dispelled. Even small supernatural manifestations take a lot of energy. That’s why temperatures drop and lights flicker when ghosts appear; like sprites, spirits have to absorb energy from the environment in order to pull themselves all the way on to this plane.

Sighting my rifle, I did the only thing I could. I shot Sig on the left side of her skull.

Oh, relax. Silver bullets are softer than normal bullets, and Sig’s bones are harder than normal bones. She had recently survived a bullet directly to the back of her head and woke up with nothing more than a migraine to show for it. I was a good enough shot to crease her skull, and even if I wasn’t, the bullet wouldn’t penetrate, anyhow. Sig didn’t heal as fast as I did, but her ability to recuperate was more than human, and I wasn’t worried about any permanent brain damage. The bullet’s impact did slosh Sig’s brain around enough to drop her, though.

I threw the rifle down.

Emil had paused at the sound of the shot, perhaps watching a mental film reel of his life’s greatest hits, but after a moment he realized that he was still breathing.

“You’ve made the right decision,” he assured me.

Uh-huh. My right hand shot out into midair and my fingers sank into slippery, translucent flesh. Sprites are very curious, and this one had thought itself safe because it wasn’t willing itself to reflect light. It had no way of knowing that my senses were sharp and my reflexes fast. I won’t say my heart was pure, but I did have the strength of three men.

The sprite started to ooze between my fingers, and I brought the top of my fist to my mouth and bared my teeth. The slick organic wriggling stopped.

“We need to talk,” I growled.

Emil walked up to where I had the sniper bound. I had dropped the M40A1 in favor of my own Ruger Blackhawk, and the sprite was making itself visible, flashing around us in a strobe effect. When the little bastards do decide to reflect light, they like to show off.

Up close, Emil looked worn and tough, a hard and rangy man in his fifties with brown hair salted with gray. His skin was leather, his eyes were flint, and his heart was a lump of coal that wasn’t becoming a diamond any time soon. He was missing half his left earlobe and the top of his right pinky. “The sniper was always a long shot. No pun intended.”

“Just so we’re clear,” I said, “I’ll let you take me in. But that’s all. I’m not agreeing to be your prisoner for life. If I get a chance to escape after that, I’ll take it. The sprite here has agreed to witness the contract.”

Emil gave me a stony look. There are rules among the old races, and if it became known among the supernatural community that knights no longer honored promises of amnesty or truce, the knights’ hard lives would become infinitely harder. “You won’t get a chance to escape.”

“Then you have nothing to lose. Make your offer formally in front of the sprite.”

“On my word of honor, no Knights Templar will harm or harass your friends if you come with me now,” Emil said softly. “And I swear as the knight who has been officially chosen to bring you in by the Grandmaster of the Order himself, it is within my power to make that promise.”

“And the Knights Templar won’t hire or encourage or manipulate anyone else into doing it, either,” I said firmly. “Or attack other people close to my friends. They are hereby bound to honor the spirit of this agreement as well as the literal meaning of it, and you will report that to your loremaster.”

“Agreed,” Emil said with a sudden expression that was a smile the same way a tiger is a housecat; they had something in common, but only if you got extremely technical or optimistic.

“And I’ll let you take me to your superiors,” I said, ignoring the dark flash of amusement in his eyes. “And I won’t attempt to escape until after I talk to them, unless someone tries to restrain or kill me.”

“That is acceptable,” Emil said.

I addressed the sprite tonelessly. “Thank you; you can go now.”

The sprite disappeared, and Emil waited for me to make the first move.

“There’s one more thing,” I said. “Sig has to believe that I took you captive, not the other way around.”

Emil remained inscrutable.

“I can’t see this working any other way,” I continued. “If Sig even thinks I’m trying to give my life for hers, she’ll come after both of us.”

“She’s going to declare war on the Knights Templar,” Emil repeated mildly, just so I could hear how stupid that sounded.

“She might.”

To his credit, Emil absorbed that thoughtfully. “What exactly are you proposing?”

“I’m going to take you all captive and drive the van out of here,” I informed him. “I’ll release you after I’ve talked to Sig and we’re safely out of sight.”

“I never agreed to that,” Emil said, and then he didn’t say anything else. It’s hard to say anything else when you’re lying unconscious on the ground.

Do you want to wake her up?” I asked Choo. I had carried Sig back to the overpass and found Choo cautiously inspecting the bodies there. Now we were both looking down at Sig’s prone form.

Choo made an after you gesture. “You’re the one who heals fast.”

He had a point, so I kicked the bottom of her boot experimentally.

Choo grinned, maybe for the first time since killing Andrej Dvornik. “I thought you Charming boys woke your women up with a kiss.”

“Those are just stories,” I observed. “And none of my ancestors had to worry about getting their collarbones broken.”

I kicked Sig’s boot a little harder and she lunged upward violently, cursing and reaching for the long sword that was no longer in her back sheath.

“You’re really not a morning person, are you?” I greeted. I didn’t really feel like joking around, but I had to make the effort or Sig would suspect something.

Choo and I had been busy. The van was parked closer, its rear doors open so that Sig could see knights s. . .