Low Elf Esteem

Book 0: Pax Arcana

by Elliott James

Genres: Contemporary Fantasy; Action & Adventure; Urban Fantasy

Synopsis

John Charming. Ex knight. Current monster hunter. A descendant from a long line of monster hunters, John Charming isn't really in the business of saving monsters from humans, but Samuel Blanco is a monster who isn't so. . .monstrous. Unfortunately, the road to a safe haven for Samuel is a treacherous path through ancient Chinese immortals, a commune where the supernatural do what comes supernaturally, a custody battle over a very special child, and a cult of half elves who are badly overcompensating for only being half elf. Forget happily ever after; it's going to take all of John Charming's brains, skill, and luck just to make it through this Midsummer nightmare.

Release date: May 16, 2017

Publisher: Orbit

Print pages: 69

Sample

 LOW ELF ESTEEM 

Once upon a time, I got my ass kicked. Not just kicked, owned, and I’m sort of partial to keeping that part of my body away from metaphors altogether. This was two years before I came down with a slight case of werewolf and had to run from the secret order of monster-hunting knights who raised me. Back in the 1960s, to be more specific. Love was free, the Vietnam War was a police action, and if you believed either of those things, there were plenty of people willing to sell you a bridge in New York or San Francisco.

I and three other knights were tracking down a Native American teenager named Eloise Garrett who had kicked her stepfather to death. The wrinkle was, Eloise’s mother was swearing that her daughter’s feet had turned to hooves and that fur had grown all over her legs before Eloise did so. Eloise was a deer woman, in other words. There’s a kind of preverbal wild magic that sometimes makes Native American women transform into beings that renounce male civilization on every level, and when deer women first manifest, it is usually because they are being actively abused or betrayed by a man. Their new unfettered self usually kicks that man to bloody bits.

Some deer women never can break out of that cycle; they stay transformed and learn to hide their lower legs while they lure unsuspecting males to isolated spots and play a different kind of footsie than the man was counting on. Other deer women learn a degree of control over their new instincts and go back to leading relatively normal lives. They might snap and transform occasionally, given the right or wrong circumstances, but they don’t have to live in forests or spend their whole lives being recluses who never let anyone see them naked. We weren’t sure which path Eloise was headed down; all we knew about Eloise Garrett was that her stepfather had probably deserved his fate and that we wanted to find her before the police did. The authorities were assuming that Eloise’s mom was delusional about the whole fur thing, probably from some combination of grief and shock and alcohol abuse, but her story had reached the ears of an Essex County reporter. That reporter had then mentioned the deer woman angle as an odd side note to give his article about the homicide some sauce. Knights don’t like that sort of thing. Not then. Not now. Not ever.

My partner, Nick Arbiter, and I were just along as backup. One of the knights’ lay servants—a meter reader in Essex County—had spotted Eloise at a greenhouse owned by a Chinese woman named Chunhua Wong. Unfortunately, that name was the only thing we could find out about the woman who had taken Eloise in, and the name was probably a fake. We knew for sure that the woman had chosen to get involved in the supernatural world, though, and it was possible—maybe even probable—that this Chunhua was some kind of cunning woman, and any kind of magic user can be trouble. I like to think that if I had been the one who had done the background research, things might have turned out a little differently. But you know what they say; it’s called hindsight because every pain in the butt has it.

The knight who had done the background research on Miss Wong—which basically amounted to a few phone calls before giving up—was named Todd Johnson, which might go a ways toward explaining why he was such a dillhole. Not that I have a lot of room to talk where names are concerned. Mine is John Charming. Anyway, Todd was not an introspective guy. He believed initiative was more important than forethought and that decisiveness was better than analysis, and in some cases that’s true. Hell, in certain kinds of messed-up situations, that “He who hesitates is lost” mind-set is the only way to survive. But not in every situation. People whose idea of fixing something is to jump in and start banging around, assuming they can make it all look okay in the end really don’t belong on bomb squads, for example.

Todd and my partner, Nick, knocked on the front door with real police ID and a real search warrant that just happened to have fake names on them. They were both big, intimidating-looking men. Todd was wearing one of those lime-green sixties suits with wide, flaring lapels and an open collar instead of a necktie, which made him look like he was planning on going out and doing some fairly hideous dancing right after work. He had a full head of thick black hair that he combed back and laminated with hair product into a permanent half Elvis. His moustache was the kind that would later come to be associated with porn. Nick was a burlier, curlier, brown-bearded version in tan.

Todd’s partner, some knight named Tony, took up a sniper position and covered the residence beside the greenhouse with an M40. We were in a fairly rural environment with no immediate neighbors, and I watched the back of the house from a small wooded area. That was all I could watch; all of the windows had drapes pulled over them.

When no one answered the door, Nick picked the lock, and they went in. About ten seconds later, I heard my partner’s loud, startled curse and began moving. I knew all the shades and textures of Nick’s startled exclamations, and that was the one he used when he was in over his head.

I didn’t kick the kitchen door in. It was an old-fashioned lock that I probably could have picked with a stick from the backyard, literally a few seconds’ work, and Nick wasn’t actively screaming. The only sound was Todd Johnson loudly ordering people to stay still and explain their presence.

I opened the door and immediately understood why Nick had freaked out. Eloise was sitting at a dinner table, but there were two other supernatural creatures with her. A beautiful woman with dusky skin and freshly washed green hair was sitting at the long end of the table next to the back wall, a dryad probably. Mediterranean, maybe pure Greek. She was wearing nothing but a damp towel. Even more worrisome, at the head of the table was a tengu.

That’s right. A tengu. In case you were about to say, “God bless you,” a tengu is a member of an ancient race of birdlike humanoids who wander the earth, warrior monks devoting their lives t. . .