Charming (10 page)

She stared back at him, something messy and complicated passing between them. Seeing that look, I knew for sure that they were lovers. It wasn’t really a May-December thing—she probably only looked as if she were in her early twenties—but I wasn’t inclined to view the two of them as a beautiful testament to love defying outside appearances either. What did I care if Dvornik was aging or sad or bitter or in love? He was an asshole.

“Yeah, Sig,” I said, dividing what was left of the eggs between our plates. “Talk to me.”

She turned her attention away from Dvornik and stared deeply into my eyes. This time I was ready for it, and I still felt the impact all the way to my groin. “You don’t have to leave Clayburg,” Sig told me.

I blinked. I admit it.

“I know you used to be a knight,” she went on. “I saw your knife. I saw the way you fought… like you’d been training to go against things that were stronger than you from birth.”

“Only they weren’t
that
much stronger than you,” Dvornik sneered. “Were they?” Words like
monster
and
hellspawn
hung there in the air, waiting for him to tack them onto the end of that sentence, but he clammed up again.

I didn’t respond. I couldn’t respond. This was a far deadlier secret than my quasi-werewolf status. For the past half century everyone who’d known this secret had tried to kill me, tried to turn me in for a reward, run away, or been killed. If I had known for sure that Sig had figured this much out, I never would have come home at all. I would have stolen the first old car I came across in the middle of the night and started driving.

What seemed like a long time passed. I just sat there, temporarily paralyzed, but if one of them had chosen that moment to sneeze, I would have been hurling the glass tray of hot sausage gravy toward Sig’s and Dvornik’s faces and elbowing Cahill in the bridge of his nose before the next second passed. Flipping my chair back, rolling, keeping in motion in case that sniper team I’d seen last night was in position in the woods around my house.

But nobody sneezed. Sig shot Dvornik a warning look. “That’s right. I can’t believe we’ve never heard any rumors about you.”

Dvornik grunted. “Do you think the knights would advertise a failure of this magnitude?”

“What the hell are you people yammering about?” Cahill demanded. He looked at Sig. “I thought knights were supposed to be like supernatural cops these days. Are you saying this guy’s a criminal?”

Sig sighed and began putting egg and bacon strips on a row of biscuits that she had pulled apart and laid out like open oysters. “It’s not that simple, Ted,” she said. “John could explain it better than I could if he would say something. A lot of what people like me know about the knights is only hearsay.”

Cahill looked at me carefully then. “You all right there, Slick?”

I exhaled, a long, slow, ragged release of breath. Sometimes
you look back on your life trying to pinpoint when or how something started, and sometimes you actually know you’re at a turning point when it’s happening. Whatever I did in the next ten seconds was either going to change me significantly or get me killed, and I wasn’t ready for a decision like that. But that’s life too—not being ready for it.

I had to trust Sig, at least provisionally. The only alternative was to kill her, and if I did that knowing only what I did about her, feeling the way I did, whatever soul I had really would be damned.

“Has Sig told you about the Pax Arcana?” I asked Cahill, reaching for my cup of coffee. My hand was shaking slightly, in a way that it hadn’t the night before, when I’d only been worried about dying.

“That’s the big ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ magic, right?” Cahill chuckled ruefully. “She held me over a rooftop with one hand and bounced me up and down by my ankle while she explained it to me. That’s what it took to make me believe it.”

I smiled faintly. A supposedly impossible threat to someone’s immediate survival is the quickest way to override the spell.

“She told me that the elves…” Cahill stopped and shook his head disbelievingly. Apparently he’d never heard himself say that out loud before. “She said that before the elves went back to where they came from, they made the spell to protect all the little half-elf bastards they were leaving behind.”

“Call them the Fae,” I advised. “Elves are just the Fae that can mate with humans, and Americans have too many weird associations with the word
elves
anyhow. These aren’t toy-makers or tree-hugging hippies in white we’re talking about. This is an ancient, powerful race that lived among us for thousands of years. We don’t know why they came. We don’t know why they left. Hell, we don’t even know why they created the
Pax. It could be they’re coming back someday and want there to be plenty of supernatural creatures for their armies. Or it could be they thought the whole thing was a good joke.”

Cahill waved his hand dismissively to indicate that terminology wasn’t way up there on his list of priorities.

“Sig said the knights are like magical bouncers or something,” Cahill continued. “They aren’t affected by the spell because the
Fae
made it so that no magic could mess with their heads.”

“It’s a little more complicated than that,” I told him. “Do you know how we came up with a cure for smallpox?”

“I went to a community college so I wouldn’t have to know stuff like that,” Cahill said dourly.

“We injected people with cowpox,” I informed him. “It was a less deadly version of the same disease, and it kept people from getting reinfected. That’s where the word
vaccine
comes from.
Vacca
is Latin for cow.”

He stared at me.

“I’m older than I look, and I read a lot,” I said. “Get over it.”

“Fine,” Cahill said. “What was the point of that little nerd moment?”

“The knights are immune to magical compulsions because they’re already under a similar spell called a geas that doesn’t permit any other kind of mind magic to get in.”

If I haven’t made this clear, magical fire will burn knights, but telepaths can’t see our thoughts. Magical lightning will shock us, but psychics can’t predict our movements or see us in visions. Spells that actually bend light can confuse our eyes, but illusionists can’t trick us by clouding our minds. Magically enhanced muscles will break our bones, but curses will slide right off us. It’s why Sig’s apparent ability to see me with some kind of psychic mojo was so unnerving. Was the magic of these
Aesir stronger than the Fae’s? Or was what Valkyries actually did some kind of hyper-focused reading of body language and pheromones and facial tics or something? How the hell did she know my name was John?

“So what does this geas force these knights to do?” Cahill asked warily.

“It’s a magically binding oath,” I said. “The knights swore to not harm any supernatural beings who aren’t threatening the Pax Arcana, and to eliminate any who are as quietly as possible.”

Cahill fixed me with a troubled stare. His eyes really were small and beady… I’d thought maybe they just looked that way because his cheeks were so pronounced, but that wasn’t the case. “So why did these knights let these Fae put them under this spell?” he demanded. “Why’d they agree to help keep monsters alive?”

It was a reasonable question. “They didn’t have a choice,” I told him.

“You said they swore an oath. That means they had a choice,” Cahill said angrily. “What could be worse than letting things that eat us hide in plain sight?”

“The Black Death,” Dvornik answered unexpectedly. His brow was lowered and he was looking at the table, chewing on his lip pensively.

Cahill gaped at him. Apparently he had heard of the Black Death.

“That’s what I was taught,” I confirmed. “When the Fae approached them back in the Middle Ages, the knights told them to shove it. The knights were hard-core Catholics and didn’t want any part of supernatural pacts. Then the plague came along.”

“It was maybe the worst plague in human history,” Sig
added, just in case Cahill wasn’t getting it. “In Europe, two out of every three people died.”

Of course, they didn’t call it the Black Death back then—we came up with that name later. Some people called it the Pestilence. Some people called it the Great Mortality. Most people who were in the middle of it called it the End of Times.

“You’re all saying the Black Death was… what… some kind of big stick these Fae used to force your knights to go along with them?” Cahill asked disbelievingly.

I ignored the part about “my” knights. “When I was in the order, a lot of the older knights called the Pax Arcana the
Pox Arcana
. It’s not like we enjoy having a set of instructions hardwired into our craniums. Would you?”

Cahill shook his head. “That is completely fucked up.”

Just agreeing would have been inadequate, so I stayed silent. We all did, for a time. I got up and got the pot of coffee and brought it back into the dining room, touching up people’s cups.

“So why are these knights after you?” Cahill asked as I poured a small amount of steaming brew into his cup. “That was what you were supposed to be telling me in the first place, right?”

“Right,” I told him. “When I said that a geas was a blood oath, I meant that it wasn’t just the knights who took the oath who were affected. All of their descendants were affected too. It passes down their bloodlines.”

Something clever and perceptive flashed across Cahill’s face before it settled into blankness again. It was like seeing shutters open and shut briefly. I realized that, far from his being dense or impatient, a lot of his attitude had been disingenuous, designed to goad me into providing further information. He
really was a detective, and a big piece had suddenly fallen into place for him.

“See, the Fae don’t think like us,” I said. “To them a few centuries are like a few minutes: they think long-term as naturally as breathing. And a lot of magical energy is generated by faith or belief. The stronger the Pax grows over time, the more people it affects. The more people it affects, the stronger it gets.”

“And?” Cahill said guardedly.

“The more successful the spell is, the more the supernatural population increases over time,” I explained. “So the more people the Pax Arcana affects, the more magical events it has to conceal to maintain the status quo. Which means that more and more knights are needed every generation to clean up the increasing number of messes. The Fae set the geas up so that the knights’ expanding family lines could meet that need as the need grew over time.”

“That’s part of the geas, isn’t it?” Sig asked slowly. “The knights are compelled to raise and train their bloodlines as a way of upholding the Pax.” Some things were falling into place for her too.

“The geas isn’t that specific,” I said. “It’s more like the mental equivalent of a shock collar. But the knights are compelled to protect the Pax, and that’s the only way they know how. Besides, they know their kids are going to be magically compelled to uphold the Pax too. They want to prepare their children so they’ll survive. So… yeah. The knights are incredibly protective of their gene pool.”

Sig snorted. “They’re practically Nazis.”

I shook my head. “That’s a little misleading. The knights consider themselves humanity’s first line of defense. They’re fanatics about keeping their bloodlines pure of any supernatural
influences, but that’s not about ethnic issues. The only race issue they care about is whether or not you belong to the human race.”

Cahill’s eyes widened until they almost looked normal. “So you having werewolf blood…”

“I’m an abomination,” I said simply. “They made me get a vasectomy when I was eleven on the off chance that my blood had been tainted, and that was when they were watching me every full moon, making me ingest trace amounts of silver, and electrically stimulating my muscles to see how strong my uncontrolled reflex reactions really were.”

“So if you were a normal human all that time, what made you…?” Sig hesitated. “How do I put this?”

“Cry wolf?” Cahill suggested. “Do it doggy-style?”

“Become an unholy fucking perversion of nature,” Dvornik supplied. Sig looked extremely pissed at this last contribution. It didn’t affect me much one way or the other. I already hated the guy.

“I swallowed some swamp water and got sick when I was twenty-seven years old,” I said.

“How did you…” Cahill paused. “Never mind.”

“I almost died,” I continued. “That was what finally made the knights who were constantly monitoring me relax a little bit. I’d made it through my developmental years, and whoever heard of a werewolf getting sick? But as far as I can figure it, that illness made something in my immune system kick in that had never had to kick in before. I started to change.”

“How did they find out?” Sig asked.

“I survived an injury that I shouldn’t have been able to survive,” I said carefully.

“What kind of injury?” Sig persisted. “Was it on a monster hunt?”

I shook my head. “That’s knight business. I’m not going to talk about that.”

“So what’s the big deal?” Cahill asked cautiously. “As long as you can’t reproduce and you’re not out there eating people… wouldn’t the geas keep these knights from killing you? That’s what you said, right? It keeps them from killing supernatural beings who aren’t a threat?”

I shrugged. “They sincerely believe I am a threat to the Pax.”

Cahill scrutinized me carefully. “Why?”

Dvornik laughed bitterly. It was clear that he didn’t find the knights’ attitude incomprehensible. “He exists.”

Cahill was still looking at me. I shrugged again.

“I’m a monster and I know all their secrets,” I said. “And I’m a walking temptation for other knights to start trying to commingle human and supernatural influences, which is dangerous. In their view I’m compromised.”

Dvornik added nastily, “And I don’t imagine you survived this long without killing more than a few knights along the way.”

“That’s true,” I agreed softly, staring at him. “And that’s why I have to leave Clayburg.”

Sig shook her head emphatically. “No, you don’t. The knights aren’t as powerful as they used to be. Do you know about…” She paused and carefully didn’t look at Cahill. “The big setback?”