Charming (2 page)

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.

2

T
he 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.