John Charming. Ex knight. Current monster hunter. Nothing with the Cunning Folk is ever free. When John Charming goes to Sarah White for help with a minor ghost problem, he soon finds himself dealing with a restless spirit on a completely different scale. And the last thing you want to be when hunting a water spirit is out of your depth. . . This is a short story from contemporary fantasy author, Elliott James, within his Pax Arcana world. The first of his novels, Charming and Daring, are available now.
Release date:
September 17, 2013
Publisher:
Orbit
Print pages:
33
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“I can’t believe this has happened.” Ronald Stewart was a large man, muscled and fat, but despair had cracked open his shell and ripped out his center. The nutless husk that was talking to us barely knew we were there. “Courtney was…I mean is…”
He began to cry, ragged, high-pitched sobs that shuddered through his whole body.
His wife was just the opposite. If Ron was a shell, tragedy had turned Debby Stewart to stone. Her body should have looked soft—she was plump and pillowy—but her face was hard and cold and devoid of weakness. “How much does an expert tracker charge, Mr. Morris?”
I looked around their home. It was a simple one-story affair, and most of the furniture in it looked decades old, possessions acquired from dead relatives and department stores. He was a retired truck driver and she worked for the city of Bonaparte in some sort of secretarial capacity. More than half of the photos in the living room had their missing nineteen-year-old daughter in them. She was a beautiful girl.
I did them the courtesy of not smiling. “I came here as a favor to Sarah. I don’t want to charge you anything. I’m not a monster.”
Which was either ironic or an outright lie because that’s exactly what I was.
Sarah was sitting next to me on the sofa, and she reached out and patted my forearm like the old friend she was pretending to be. She was an attractive woman with long black hair, closing in on forty and wearing it well, the sort of person you think of when you think “yoga instructor” although I had no idea if she did yoga or not. I had met her two hours ago.
* * *
“This place looks funky,” Isaac Roberts had commented that morning. “But it feels like Christmas.”
I would have described it as Norman-Rockwell-meets-the-pagans myself, but I knew what he meant. The bakery we were sitting in was a combination of delicious smells and New Age art and old-fashioned corner store. The counter of the glass case and the Formica tables had been overrun by pewter figurines of forest life and tiny trees made of copper wire with green beaded leaves. All around us lots of earth-toned pottery held pretty plants that you just knew had pretty names, long Latin titles that would roll off the tongue mellifluously if you only knew how to pronounce them.
The beadwork and tapestries and paintings hanging. . .
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