Charmed I'm Sure (4 page)

The pike entered under her breastbone but missed her heart. For a moment, a precious moment, the branch held her suspended there—not piercing all the way through the thick muscle in her shoulders, but not snapping under her weight, either—and I used that instant of saving grace to dart out from beneath her. She managed an inelegant swipe at me and two things happened simultaneously: The pike snapped in half, dropping her to the ground; and her paw caught the tip of the compound bow jutting out above my head. I was spun around crazily toward deeper water, the bow nearly dislocating my shoulder as the bow was violently ripped off of my body.

Still whirling and lurching, I fell backward into the river. She lumbered toward me, in pain but insane with rage, and I escaped in the only direction that offered me any chance of survival: down. Twisting beneath the water, I did not use my legs to propel myself in a straight fast line away from her because that was the obvious choice, but slid away at an angle.

The mud and the cold water must have lowered my core temperature enough, as she lost me in the dark river. My body was actually corkscrewed around by the impact when her full weight broke through the surface of the water a few feet in front of me. Struggling to orient myself, I made for the direction that I thought the cleft rock was in.

I was close enough, emerging a few feet from where the hawthorn stake was jutting above the surface of the river. I tore it from its makeshift sheath while gunfire ripped through the night.

Eric was firing at the wila with the Thompson again. If she hadn't already been half mad with pain, she might have ignored him. The lead bullets could not kill her, but they stung, and animal instincts tend to come to the forefront when a shape-shifter is frightened and tired and wounded. The bear forgot about me for a moment and lumbered toward the Marine.

I charged after the wila, counting on the sounds from the Thompson and the splashing of the bear's larger body to cover my own noise, and when the Thompson ran dry, the bear's roar still served that purpose. Eric's body went flying through the air an instant before mine did. I landed on the bear's back. I don't know where Eric landed, or in how many pieces. I never saw him again.

I stabbed the hawthorn stake through the bear's right eye, but my fingers were numbing and her neck was too thick to get my arm all the way around; my body slid at the last instant so that the tip of the stake did not pierce the bear's brain. The creature rose up on its hind legs and threw me off with a violent twist that brought its moving upper shoulder into contact with my chest as I was slipping. If she had caught me with an elbow or forearm it would have cracked my breastbone open. As it was, I went hurtling backward through the air and landed in the river again.

The bear went down on all fours, its movements sluggish. The wila was in a predicament. A large fragment of wood was lodged inside her, and if she shape-shifted into anything smaller, that body would draw in around the pike until the wila wound up impaling herself. But the bear's form did not have the manual dexterity to remove the pike, and the wila was losing blood.

The bear went up on its hind legs so that its forepaws could at least clutch at the stake that was sticking out of her right eye. I dove into the water while the bear was distracted, and when I came up I was directly in front of the standing bear as she was hurling the stake away with an awkward outward parting of her paws.

We both lunged frantically. I moved toward the bear, plunging my right hand into the pike wound in her chest while she drew her arms inward to crush me in its embrace. The bear's own strength pulled me farther in while my hand was pushing into the pike, tilting it, and I think that is the only thing that saved my life. I'm not really certain. Those last few instants are lost to me. All I remember is being borne away in a black avalanche of pain.

A voice eventually woke me. My body was freezing and wet and my neck was killing me, but not literally, so I went ahead and opened my eyes. The first thing that I saw was the wila, human-looking and washed up against the same riverbank that I was on except that her face was under the water, the pike still jutting from both sides of her torso, my knife sticking out of her side. I don't know how many hours it had taken me to heal, but the sun was up. I closed my eyes again, but the voice kept yelling. My body was strangely unresponsive when I forced myself to flop over on my back—my wounds had closed, but the temperature of the water and my unnatural position had impaired my blood flow. It would have been helpful if the blond Marine screaming at me had pulled me from the edge of the water, but then I realized that he couldn't. The sun was shining
through
him.

I dropped my head back into the water and closed my eyes again. Maybe I was dead. That wouldn't be so bad if the voice would just shut up.

But it didn't. The voice kept screaming, and then a thought materialized in my mind fully formed:
the faery ring
. The other Marine must have come out of his trance and left the faery circle when the wila died, still stuck in that in-between place.
He's no ghost, but he's still toast
, I thought with that muzzy irreverence of the half-conscious.
He's doing the Limbo, Jimbo.
The only reason I could see him was that I had performed the counter-charm.

Another thought then:
Someone has to bury the bugganes.

There was still work to be done. Opening my eyes again, I rolled over onto my side and began the slow painful crawl back to life.

by Elliott James

John Charming isn't your average prince…

He comes from a line of Charmings—an illustrious family of dragon slayers, witch finders and killers dating back to before the fall of Rome. Trained by a modern-day version of the Knights Templar, monster hunters who have updated their tools from chain mail and crossbows to Kevlar and shotguns, he was one of the best. That is—until he became the abomination the knights were sworn to hunt.

That was a lifetime ago. Now he tends bar under an assumed name in rural Virginia and leads a peaceful, quiet life. One that shouldn't change just because a vampire and a blonde walk into his bar…right?

Once upon a time, she smelled wrong. Well, no, that's not exactly true. She smelled clean, like fresh snow and air after a lightning storm and something hard to identify, something like sex and butter pecan ice cream. Honestly, I think she was the best thing I'd ever smelled. I was inferring “wrongness” from the fact that she wasn't entirely human.

I later found out that her name was Sig.

Sig stood there in the doorway of the bar with the wind behind her, and there was something both earthy and unearthly about her. Standing at least six feet tall in running shoes, she had shoulders as broad as a professional swimmer's, sinewy arms, and well-rounded hips that were curvy and compact. All in all, she was as buxom, blonde, blue-eyed, and clear-skinned as any woman who had ever posed for a Swedish tourism ad.

And I wanted her out of the bar, fast.

You have to understand, Rigby's is not the kind of place where goddesses were meant to walk among mortals. It is a small, modest establishment eking out a fragile existence at the tail end of Clayburg's main street. The owner, David Suggs, had wanted a quaint pub, but instead of decorating the place with dartboards or Scottish coats of arms or ceramic mugs, he had decided to celebrate southwest Virginia culture and covered the walls with rusty old railroad equipment and farming tools.

When I asked why a bar—excuse me, I mean
pub
—with a Celtic name didn't have a Celtic atmosphere, Dave said that he had named Rigby's after a Beatles song about lonely people needing a place to belong.

“Names have power,” Dave had gone on to inform me, and I had listened gravely as if this were a revelation.

Speaking of names, “John Charming” is not what it reads on my current driver's license. In fact, about the only thing accurate on my current license is the part where it says that I'm black-haired and blue-eyed. I'm six foot one instead of six foot two and about seventy-five pounds lighter than the 250 pounds indicated on my identification. But I do kind of look the way the man pictured on my license might look if Trevor A. Barnes had lost that much weight and cut his hair short and shaved off his beard. Oh, and if he were still alive.

And no, I didn't kill the man whose identity I had assumed, in case you're wondering. Well, not the first time anyway.

Anyhow, I had recently been forced to leave Alaska and start a new life of my own, and in David Suggs I had found an employer who wasn't going to be too thorough with his background checks. My current goal was to work for Dave for at least one fiscal year and not draw any attention to myself.

Which was why I was not happy to see the blonde.

For her part, the blonde didn't seem too happy to see me either. Sig focused on me immediately. People always gave me a quick flickering glance when they walked into the bar—excuse me, the pub—but the first thing they really checked out was the clientele. Their eyes were sometimes predatory, sometimes cautious, sometimes hopeful, often tired, but they only returned to me after being disappointed. Sig's gaze, however, centered on me like the oncoming lights of a train—assuming train lights have slight bags underneath them and make you want to flex surreptitiously. Those same startlingly blue eyes widened, and her body went still for a moment.

Whatever had triggered her alarms, Sig hesitated, visibly debating whether to approach and talk to me. She didn't hesitate for long, though—I got the impression that she rarely hesitated for long—and chose to go find herself a table.

Now, it was a Thursday night in April, and Rigby's was not empty. Clayburg is host to a small private college named Stillwaters University, one of those places where parents pay more money than they should to get an education for children with mediocre high school records. This sort of target student—an underachiever with upper-middle-class parents—not surprisingly does a lot of heavy drinking, which is why Rigby's manages to stay in business. Small bars with farming implements on the walls don't really draw huge college crowds, but the more popular bars tend to stay packed, and Rigby's does attract an odd combination of local rednecks and students with a sense of irony. So when a striking six-foot blonde who wasn't an obvious transvestite sat down in the middle of the bar, there were people around to notice.

Even Sandra, a nineteen-year-old waitress who considers customers an unwelcome distraction from covert texting, noticed the newcomer. She walked up to Sig promptly instead of making Renee, an older waitress and Rigby's de facto manager, chide her into action.

For the next hour I pretended to ignore the new arrival while focusing on her intently. I listened in—my hearing is as well developed as my sense of smell—while several patrons tried to introduce themselves. Sig seemed to have a knack for knowing how to discourage each would-be player as fast as possible.

She told suitors that she wanted to be up-front about her sex change operation because she was tired of having it cause problems when her lovers found out later, or she told them that she liked only black men, or young men, or older men who made more than seventy thousand dollars a year. She told them that what really turned her on was men who were willing to have sex with other men while she watched. She mentioned one man's wife by name, and when the weedy-looking grad student doing a John Lennon impersonation tried the sensitive-poet approach, she challenged him to an arm-wrestling contest. He stared at her, sitting there exuding athleticism, confidence, and health—three things he was noticeably lacking—and chose to be offended rather than take her up on it.

There was at least one woman who seemed interested in Sig as well, a cute sandy-haired college student who was tall and willowy, but when it comes to picking up strangers, women are generally less likely to go on a kamikaze mission than men. The young woman kept looking over at Sig's table, hoping to establish some kind of meaningful eye contact, but Sig wasn't making any.

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 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.