Charming (11 page)

I made an affirmative gesture. There had almost been an all-out war between knights and vampires shortly after the turn of the new millennium. If you think humans went a little crazy when 2000 rolled around, you should have seen what it was like among the supernatural communities. That conflict is why there are a lot of vampires like Steve Ellison running around without masters or hives to keep them in line now. The escalating hostilities had cost both sides dearly.

“Well, I don’t know all the details, but the knights have been having similar problems with large werewolf packs in the Midwest,” Sig informed me. “Plus, there was some kind of big ruckus in Alaska recently. Their numbers are down and their reputation has suffered. The Pax is breaking down and the knights are stretched thin.”

I kept my face expressionless. The big ruckus in Alaska had been a massive manhunt for me.

“If we tell them that there was a renegade vampire here but that we destroyed it, I doubt they’ll even send anyone personally,” Sig asserted.

I didn’t bother to hide my skepticism. “You’re telling me that the knights will listen to you? A nonhuman?”

Sig’s face contorted as if she’d bitten into something rancid. “God, no. Those assholes tolerate my existence as long as I don’t break any of their rules, but they don’t listen to me.” Then she nodded at Dvornik. “They listen to him.”

“Of course they do.” My voice was so low that I was almost whispering. Dvornik and I regarded each other. If he was one of the knights’ informants, one of us was going to die no matter what Sig believed. Then I remembered Sig saying that she had a friend who had visions. Dvornik was Slavic. Clayburg had a vampire problem. Sig was with Dvornik, and somehow she’d gotten into monster hunting. I’d sensed a bodiless presence the night before. All of these fragments came rushing together, and when I looked at Dvornik’s brow I saw it, the slight discoloration over his left eye from where he had been born with a caul, that membrane that covers parts of some babies’ faces and used to be considered a sign of psychic ability.

I leveled a finger at him. “You’re a kresnik.”

Something dark fluttered behind Dvornik’s eyes.

“I told you he’s smarter than he acts,” Sig murmured, patting Dvornik’s forearm.

The Fae didn’t put all their eggs into one basket when they were looking for human enforcers. Back in the Middle Ages there was no way that a bunch of Europeans could have effectively policed China, or that Japanese agents could have operated discreetly in Africa. The Fae always picked small, secret societies of highly trained warriors who didn’t owe political allegiance to any one king or emperor, but they diversified. In France and England they chose the Knights Templar. In Africa they chose a lost Berber tribe. In Japan they chose a bunch of warrior monks called
yamabushi
.

Kresniks are Eastern Europe’s answer to the Knights Templar. After the Mongol invasion and the Knights Hospitaller scandal, Eastern Europe didn’t have much use for knightly orders with private agendas, and when the Fae were looking for a small covert group to police that area, they selected Croatia’s secret society of vampire slayers instead.

The kresniks’ jurisdiction extended through Yugoslavia all the way to Italy, where they were called
Benandanti
.

The main difference between kresniks and knights is that kresniks are chosen on the basis of having psychic ability, not born into a family line. Their version of the geas is passed on psychically through some kind of training ceremony. This is partly why kresniks don’t get hung up on working with supernatural creatures the way knights do. From the beginning the kresniks were regarded as supernatural creatures themselves, outcasts who were distrusted more than revered. They were also mostly working-class types who had a gift, not European nobles who had been raised to believe that they were superior, elite, and exclusive.

Kresniks have a long tradition of working side by side with dhampirs and cunning folk and werewolves who aren’t out of control, so much so that some stories confuse kresniks with all of those things. Which probably made Dvornik’s dislike of me personal rather than professional.

Anyhow, the knights respect kresniks the same way that US Special Forces respect the British SAS. Kresniks are a smaller order, but they are very effective even if they don’t just hunt vampires anymore. If things were as bad as Sig said, it was just barely conceivable that the knights might listen to a kresnik out of professional courtesy.

“Why would you do this for me?” I asked Dvornik.

Sig answered for him. “I know things about people. Not everything. Not even the things I want to know the most, sometimes. But things come to me.”

“How could you know things about me?” I finally asked. “The geas should keep you from getting any kind of reading off me at all.”

She hesitated. “I just do.”

Bullshit. She was hiding something. A big something. But every instinct I had was telling me that she didn’t intend me harm.

“So what do you know?” I wasn’t at all sure that I wanted to hear it.

“You’re screwed up,” she said. “You’ve been alone so long that you’re on the verge of going a little crazy with it. You’ve been working so hard on protecting yourself against death that you’re starting to protect yourself against life. You’re not sure you trust your impulses because you’re paranoid about being part wolf, but you’re also forced to rely on your instincts because you can’t trust anyone else, so you try to analyze and question and anticipate everything even though you can’t. You
feel guilty just about being alive because you were raised by Catholic monster hunters, but you also recognize how messed up that is and resent any kind of authority figure.”

For some reason I had a sudden image of those old Charlie Brown cartoons, the ones where Lucy is offering psychiatry sessions for five cents.

Sig leaned forward. If she could have reached me, I think she would have taken my hand. “And I like you. Beneath all the anger and coping mechanisms, you’re also brave. And loyal. And kind. And funny. And strong-willed. And smart. And if you don’t start forming some real roots and relationships again, you’re going to wither into a smaller, harder, and sadder person than you really are.”

OK then.

“That… means something to me,” I said slowly, and it did. What, exactly, I wasn’t sure. I could have kissed her or slapped her and felt equally justified on either count. “Now shut up and let me talk to your boyfriend.”

Sig looked stunned. I don’t think she was used to being resisted while she was in full persuasion mode. I took advantage of her temporary silence and addressed Dvornik again.

“Why would you cover for me?” I asked him bluntly. “You don’t like me.”

Dvornik barked out a short spasm of a laugh. He seemed to be genuinely amused rather than making some kind of bitter, sarcastic statement. Then the amusement died out and he stared at me seriously. “If I didn’t,” and at this point he nodded slowly toward Sig, “she would leave me.”

You know, there’s honesty, and then there’s too much information. We all sat there, not sure how to move forward after that last little bomb mot. Sig looked like she’d been sucker punched a second time. It was clear that she wanted to say
something, but she wasn’t sure what, or even which one of us she wanted to say it to. Served her right. You play with fire, you get burned. You play with intimacy, you get awkward.

Cahill cleared his throat. “You said you wanted to tell him two things,” he reminded Sig, indicating me with a jut of his chin. “What was the second?”

“Oh.” Sig looked as if she was having second thoughts but went on anyhow. “We could use your help going after the rest of the vampire hive today.”

If she’d known me half as well as she thought she did, she would have told me that part first.

9

I
hadn’t lived in Clayburg long, but even I knew that once you got to the streets numbered higher than fourteen, you were in a bad part of town. The address on Steve Ellison’s license was on Seventeenth Street.

There were six of us traveling in the van I’d seen the night before, an exterminator’s van as it turned out. Which would have been a lot more comfortable if I hadn’t had an enhanced sense of smell. Cigarette smoke and pot stink clung to the cracking black plastic of the seats, mingling with the lingering odor of pesticides and fumigants and antiseptic cleaners. And beneath all of that, the faint scent of trace molecules left behind by bodies, human and inhuman, in varying degrees of decomposition. It made it hard to pretend that I was riding in the Mystery Machine with Scooby-Doo and the gang.

The African American man the van belonged to turned out to be a guy named Chauncey Childers whose parents had obviously combined a love of alliteration with a hatred of small children. When we officially met at Dvornik’s studio, Chauncey had told me that everybody called him Choo Choo for short
or Choo for even shorter. He had skin the color of coffee and cream and was big-bellied and bony-assed, with lots of tiny braids coming out of his skull that were bound together by prayer beads. A long drooping mustache surrounded his goatee without ever quite touching it. Choo was somewhere in his mid-forties or early fifties, an inch or so shy of six feet, and he had a disproportionately long torso. When we were standing up, I was taller than he was, but sitting in the van he looked down at me.

Choo really was a professional exterminator. It said so on the card he showed me. The card also advertised spiritual cleansings and negative energy removal and had a Web address. When I had asked him how he had gotten involved with this group, he clapped me on the shoulder and told me that he had seen some shit exterminating old houses that I would not believe. Then he’d smiled real big and brayed a loud, slightly nervous laugh, and said, “Oh, hell, I guess you would believe it.”

I was sitting shotgun while Choo drove. Sig and Dvornik were in the two bolted-down bucket seats that made a gap-toothed smile of a second row. Neither Sig nor Dvornik had said more than a few words since we’d left my house, not to each other and certainly not to anybody else. It had made it a little awkward when I was forced to rely on them for introductions. When I asked Sig where Cahill had gone, she had tersely informed me that he had a job.

At the back of the van, squatting on a large folded rubber tent amid a clutter of metal canisters, brightly colored cardboard boxes, canvas bags, and sheets of plastic, were the East European twins who had turned out to be younger, smaller versions of Dvornik. Topping out at five-ten, they were dark, barrel-chested, no-necked, and silent. I was mentally referring to them as Burly and Surly. They were also Dvornik’s nephews.

I had pressed a little and found out that Dvornik had a twin
sister who was also a kresnik, and I briefly imagined someone who looked like Fred Flintstone in drag except with a mustache and a chain saw, but I cut that out when I found out that the sister was dead. Even though Andrej and Andro had a psychic mammy, they hadn’t inherited the old psychic whammy. The brothers apparently served full-fledged kresniks as support staff. If the scar tissue under their eyes and around their knuckles was any indication, that didn’t just involve fetching coffee and taking memos.

The Knights Templar also have soldiers who aren’t bound by the geas, although they’re called lay servants or sergeants depending on whether they serve as rear support or in a combat capacity. They’re mostly people who don’t come from a bloodline proper but have been orphaned or woken up from the Pax Arcana by some kind of traumatic experience.

When I’d said hello to Andrej and Andro, they’d just stared at me. Sig had looked somewhere else and explained that they didn’t speak much English. I don’t know any Croatian, but I’d tried saying “Guten tag,” which means “Good day” in German, and “Jak sa wy robiacy,” which I’m about 70 percent sure means “How are you?” in Polish.

They just kept staring at me. They were related to Dvornik all right.

Fortunately or unfortunately, Chauncey “Choo Choo” Childers didn’t mind filling in the awkward silence. I wasn’t really sure what to make of him. He was definitely the source of the marijuana reek, and he talked with a breezy self-assurance that I wasn’t sure I trusted. There was something impersonal about his friendliness, like it was a kind of armor that he hid behind while observing the world around him dispassionately. He chatted about his interest in feng shui and made fun of his failed attempts to become a priest. Apparently he had filled out
forms at various Web sites that offered to ordain you for free, but even though he was legally able to perform wedding ceremonies in most states, he still couldn’t make holy water that burned undead flesh.