Talking Dirty (Pax Arcana) (5 page)

I began to walk toward her, and the siren dropped to the ground effortlessly, landing in a slight crouch as those supernaturally strong thighs absorbed the impact without any sign of strain. She kept singing the entire time, and I kept walking toward her, but I guess my zombie shuffle didn’t really resemble the way men really moved under the effects of her song. Or maybe she actually formed some kind of psychic connection with her victims, and she wasn’t getting any telepathic feedback from me. It was the reason I’d never risked calling the sex line. Whatever the cause, she sensed something was wrong and stopped singing and started screaming.

The scream didn’t sound human. It didn’t sound birdlike either. It was some weird hybrid sound. More worryingly, I heard an answering cry from the clearing behind me, and then another.

Well, at least she didn’t want to talk. I hate it when monsters want to talk.

I brought my crossbow up, but the siren bounded forward and covered the distance between us in two freakishly fast hop-and-skips. When I fired a crossbow bolt straight at her center mass, one of her feet kicked up and actually grabbed the short missile out of the air from six feet away. Fortunately, it slowed her down, and birdlike or not, the other foot was holding her up when I released the second bolt; it took her about an inch above her heart, puncturing the top of a lung if her anatomy went that way. Her body crashed into mine and knocked the crossbow out of my hand, but I kept my balance. Close up, I shifted to the side and caught the leg that was coming up before her knee could drive into me. I brought my hand up under her calf and lifted her body up off the ground, parallel to mine. She was lighter than she should have been—maybe her bones were hollow and more flexible than a human’s—and those clawed feet had no solid surface to push off against. She squawked and brought her right hand up to my face. Her fingernails were long and thick and sharp and scored trails up my cheek while she scrabbled for my eyes, but those claws stopped moving when I dropped and brought her back down on the sharp point of my knee. However her bones differed from mine, she had a spine, and it snapped.

I dropped her while she was still yelling, rising and whirling around, reaching for the katana sheathed between my shoulders. Her sister was screaming behind me and coming in fast, and thank God the sister had paused to take off her boots, because I needed that extra three seconds. If the art of the fast draw weren’t so integral to the katana, I wouldn’t have made it. The sister came bounding at me in a kind of untrained but instinctive front kick—damn, these things moved fast! The claws of her right foot were extended and pointed in a kind of pincerlike formation that would seize my throat and tear it out.

Instead, I brought my katana around in a strike that mostly severed her foot. It would have removed the foot completely, but I didn’t have time to fully bring my hips into play, and whatever the claw was made of was insanely gnarled and hard. She screamed. The second siren’s right claw and my katana both went flying, and her body crashed past me at a side angle that sent both of us to the ground.

I rolled to my feet. She anchored her good claw in the ground, pulled her entire body upright in a way that no human could have accomplished, and grabbed at me with clawed hands before I could increase the distance between us. That should have been fine; her lower half was much stronger than mine, but her upper half was slightly weaker. I blocked her hands at the forearms and hit her in the face with short jabs, once, twice, three times before driving in a punch that would have snapped her neck if her bones really weren’t lighter and more flexible than mine.

I was controlling the situation until the siren whose back I’d snapped reached up from the ground and drove her fingernails into my right calf. I screamed myself and buckled slightly, twisting inside the older sister’s reach and wrapping my right arm around her neck to hold myself up. Even without a right foot, she brought her right knee up in a strike that shattered at least three of my ribs through the Kevlar vest I was wearing. I went with it, twisted my body in the direction her knee was driving me, and used my weight to snap her neck.

I fell when the older siren who was holding me up fell. The younger sister on the ground hadn’t been idle, and her nails actually severed my Achilles tendon, but I managed to catch my descent on my knees, and when my left hand came up from my hip, it was holding one of the crossbow quarrels. Kneeling, I drove the quarrel through the younger siren’s eye while she was flopping on the ground and trying to drive her claws through the Kevlar vest to disembowel me.

That’s when a rifle shot knocked me on my ass. The third sister was carrying a 700 Remington, though I didn’t know it at the time, and thank God she’d fired at center mass. It put me down, but the Kevlar kept my heart from being torn out. I stayed flat on the ground, a harder target while my somewhat numb fingers fumbled to unholster my Ruger Blackhawk. Another shot tore into the ground right in front of my upper left thigh, and I rolled behind a tree.

I needn’t have bothered. Between the singing and screaming and shooting, Samuel’d had all the cover he needed. The siren was fifty yards away, but I still saw it clearly when Samuel came out of nowhere, half human and half bull. Horns had emerged from his head, black fur was covering his body, and I don’t think I was imagining the flames licking behind him when he charged. The siren heard him at the last moment, dropped the rifle, and tried to bound out of the way, but he caught her as she left the ground and carried her forward with bone-crushing impact.

The Ruger Blackhawk was free at this point, and I rolled on to my stomach and trained my gun in the direction of the clearing. I could hear other sounds approaching, human sounds, some male and some female. I didn’t know how many lovers, servants, or slaves the sirens had in that compound, but the yells I heard didn’t sound like jubilant people taking their chance to claim freedom. They sounded like an angry mob.

I didn’t have to fire. By the time my Achilles tendon was healed, Samuel had finished with them.

The trailers were full of swag. Jewelry, mostly, diamonds and emeralds and sapphires and rubies set into rings and necklaces and bracelets and earrings. The stuff was used as decoration, hanging from the walls and ceilings like Christmas tree lights, set on shelves like knickknacks, draped around lampshades and the bases of candles. I’ve had some practice gauging such things, and even at pawn or black market rates, I thought I could get at least two million dollars from the booty eventually, though half of any gain would be Samuel’s. I would probably keep the stuff in a storage silo for a couple of years in case it needed to cool off too.

I really, really hoped the place was as secluded as it seemed, what with all of the screaming and the rifle shots. It was going to take time to dispose of the sirens’ bodies, bury the deputy that Samuel had killed among all the other victims, and use the human bodies of the siren’s crew to frame a narrative. There had been three human females and five human males in the mix, and if I was reading the signs and bed smells right, three of the human females had been one of the sirens’ lovers and the males had been divided between the other two.

I thought I could make it look like the females and maybe some of the males had been running the phone sex operation as a way of luring victims to them. The hard part was going to be figuring out how to tip off the FBI and making the bodies that Samuel had broken and burned look like part of some kind of natural occurrence. Maybe I could make it look like a gunfight had occurred—fire bullets into some of the corpses, then set the trailers with the bodies inside them on fire as if someone was trying to destroy forensic evidence. Maybe leave some kind of gang tag to suggest a raid by a gang or cartel that the operation had refused to work for…or perhaps I could make it look like this crew had finally killed a victim with mob connections, or someone with a brother in the military. Whatever. I could work it out. A fire would actually be a great way to draw in authorities too. I could just report smoke instead of giving the FBI some covert tip-off. Authorities would search the surrounding woods when they found the bodies in the trailers and matched the cars’ license plates to missing victims. Someone would find the bodies eventually, including Jim Reedy’s.

And when the authorities contacted Cassie about Steve Jameson, she would talk about me, and my story about having a police friend from Vista Verde who had been checking out some hinky phone sex operation. Things wouldn’t make sense, but they would fall together all the same. The truth is, law enforcement types never have all the facts, and nothing ever completely makes sense. They try to piece together a story, and once they choose a plot, they let the story determine how they fill in the gaps. Some law agencies might come looking for me anyway, but I didn’t think they’d look too hard, and I was used to staying off the grid. My name and appearance and location would all have changed by the time they got around to it.

I could make it work. I just needed a few days.

I got them.

“Why do we have to keep moving all the time?” Samuel complained. “And why couldn’t we keep the truck? This Jeep stinks.”

We were driving the red Jeep to anywhere but Porter, only it was blue now. It turned out that the license plates on the vehicles weren’t legit—they were license plates that had been made by shearing multiple license plates in two and then welding them back together in different combinations. You couldn’t see the weld until you examined the license plates up close. I had removed all of the license plates from all the vehicles and was keeping them in a stack. The law enforcement agencies would still be able to trace the vehicles back to their owners through serial numbers, and the license plates might come in handy. “We won’t keep it long,” I said. “Just long enough to find you a new home.”

“What home?” Samuel demanded.

Well, that was the question, wasn’t it?

An army brat and gypsy scholar, ELLIOTT JAMES is currently living in the Blue Ridge Mountains of southwest Virginia. An avid reader since the age of three (or that’s what his family swears, anyhow), he has an abiding interest in mythology, martial arts, live music, hiking, and used bookstores. Irrationally convinced that cell phone technology was inserted into human culture by aliens who want to turn us into easily tracked herd beasts, Elliott has one anyhow but keeps it in a locked, tinfoil-covered box which he will sometimes sit and stare at mistrustfully for hours. Okay, that was a lie. Elliott lies a lot; in fact, he decided to become a writer so that he could get paid for it.

Photo Credit: Author

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?

There’s a reason that we refer to being in love as being enchanted. Think back to the worst relationship you’ve ever been in: the one where your family and friends tried to warn you that the person you were with was cheating on you, or partying a little too much, or a control freak, or secretly gay, or whatever. Remember how you were convinced that no one but you could see the real person beneath that endearingly flawed surface? And then later, after the relationship reached that scorched-earth-policy stage where letters were being burned and photos were being cropped, did you find yourself looking back and being amazed at how obvious the truth had been all along? Did it feel as if you were waking up from some kind of a spell?

Well, there’s something going on right in front of your face that you can’t see right now, and you’re not going to believe me when I point it out to you. Relax, I’m not going to provide a number where you can leave your credit card information, and you don’t have to join anything. The only reason I’m telling you at all is that at some point in the future, you might have a falling-out with the worldview you’re currently enamored of, and if that happens, what I’m about to tell you will help you make sense of things later.

I know it sounds ridiculous. How could magic really exist in a world with an Internet and forensic science and smartphones and satellites and such and still go undiscovered?

The truth is that the world is under a spell called the Pax Arcana, a compulsion that makes people unable to see, believe, or even seriously consider any evidence of the supernatural that is not an immediate threat to their survival.

And I am not living happily ever after.