Charming (5 page)

In between wiping and racking and stacking, I rummaged around behind some bottles of truly hideous wine that Dave had let a pretty sales rep talk him into buying and removed a silver steel knife with an illegally long blade. Silver steel is an alloy with a silver quotient high enough to be effective against creatures who are vulnerable to such things, but not so high as to fundamentally weaken the metal. Its metallurgic composition is one of the many secrets of the Knights Templar, and it is one they’ve guarded for over five centuries.

If that sounds impressive, the truth is that modern science could figure out how to make silver steel easily; it’s just that, without a belief in werewolves, there’s never been a profit incentive for doing so.

Next I got the unlabeled vodka bottle full of holy water out and removed a broom from a storage closet. I snapped the bristly top off the broom, then broke the shaft into three jagged
wooden stakes. I wound up using some duct tape from the same closet to anchor the stakes to the belt strap of my knife sheath.

Finally I stripped down to my T-shirt and khaki pants and sneakers. I was almost done mopping when I smelled the blood. It was a deep, thick smell, rich with bodily nutrients. The blood had come from a major artery, aortal or maybe femoral. Whoever it had come from was dead whether they were quite finished living or not.

There was a condenser unit out back where my car was parked, and it was probably what had pumped the smell of blood into the bar. The alleys behind Rigby’s link several small businesses and low-rent apartment buildings. Drunks and drug deals and sexual transactions are common there. Maybe someone had wandered by while Ellison was waiting, and his hunger had been too great. Maybe he was killing potential witnesses or distractions, and he hadn’t thought about the air-conditioning.

Or maybe while I was shrugging off Ellison’s attempts at hypnosis, the vampire was learning about me. Maybe he knew something about knights and the geas that both binds us and protects us.

A geas is a magical oath that drives knights to fulfill a specific duty, and the Knights Templar have sworn to uphold the Pax Arcana. Basically that means that we do not harm supernatural beings unless they are on the verge of revealing themselves to mankind, but when a supernatural being is judged terminally indiscreet, we eliminate them as quietly as possible.

Steve Ellison killing people indiscriminately in an open alley behind public housing was definitely not discreet. Especially not after he’d been warned.

I’m not saying that the geas turns me into some kind of zombie with no free will; knights can be very creative about how
we deal with threats to the Pax, and we can even ignore the geas, although doing this for too long or too often can result in unpleasant consequences: migraines, nightmares, hallucinations, bouts of public flatulence, an inexplicable fascination with reality television… well, you get the idea. If the situation continues to escalate, the Pax can even lead to things like waking up in the middle of a dangerous situation after sleepwalking into it, or insanity. Think Lancelot wandering around for years in the wilderness, a madman because he couldn’t find the Holy Grail.

The plus side of being under a geas is that no other kind of mental magic can influence you because your mind’s dance card is already filled. The geas is a jealous mistress.

I put the mop down, picked up the bottle of holy water, and walked to Dave’s office, where a window faced a side alley. Throwing open the window, I was immediately hit by a wave of vampire stink. Unfortunately, it was the scent of a vampire I didn’t recognize. I also smelled more blood, different blood.

Steve Ellison had hive mates after all, and they were turning the back alleys into a killing ground.

I didn’t hear any movement except a distant car on Main Street, and I should have. Taking care to protect the bottle, I jumped to the ground below the window. Nothing. I closed the window. Nothing. Conditions were perfect for scanning: there were no Dumpsters or obstructions in the alley—just two old brick walls a little too close to each other and a lot of graffiti. The moon and stars were out, and the air was cold and clear and silent, but I still wasn’t picking up anything.

Suddenly I heard a feeble bubbling cough from the back alleys, a death rattle from someone whose lungs weren’t in one piece any longer. Fury poured through me like lava. It was only a few nights until the full moon, and they were hunting on the
wolf’s territory, and the geas was singing in my veins. I also had an intuition that the vampires were trying to flush me out and herd me toward the main street, that they expected me to run for safety and were prepared for it. Screw it.

I took off toward the back of the bar at a run and set off a sudden flurry of activity. Gravel was kicked up on a rooftop behind me to the east. Ahead of me and hidden by the bar, two sets of feet in the vicinity of my car were running on the ground toward the same alley opening I was headed toward. Someone on Main Street was indeed running into my alley after me. I didn’t look back.

They were all moving fast. Almost as fast as I was. Vampires are stronger than werewolves, but they don’t have an edge in speed, and these parasites were overconfident. They knew they had me surrounded, and I was the one running for my life.

A shadow began to emerge around the corner of the alley while I was still approaching it. I’ve had a lot of experience gauging the movement and speed of shadows, and I hurled the bottle of holy water underhanded at a dead run. When a tall curly-haired vampire in a black muscle shirt rounded the corner, the bottle was only inches away from his face. His supernaturally fast reflexes actually worked against him: he instinctively brought up the sawed-off shotgun he was holding to ward the bottle off, but this was a mistake. The glass shattered as he whipped the metal barrels into it, and holy water sprayed over his head, hitting his face like acid and shriveling his eyes.

The vampire’s grip loosened on the shotgun as he began to keen, clawing at his steaming sockets. The sound was horrifically loud and blatantly inhuman, and it stirred up ancestral memories of a time when humans knew that they weren’t the dominant species. Every human who heard that howl fell under
the effect of the Pax Arcana. None of them would peer out windows overlooking the back alleys now. Squad cars would decide to stay on the main streets without knowing why. People whose needs or inclinations might have taken them through the alleys would impulsively decide to take alternate routes.

There would be no distractions now.

I had never stopped running, and I snatched the shotgun out of the keening vampire’s hand and continued turning with the motion, shoulder-charging him at full speed. Just as a matter of perspective, full speed meant that we were moving so fast that I actually charged through the main body of holy water and broken glass while they were still in the air.

I caught the vampire dead center under the breastbone while he was backpedaling. Shards of glass tore into my upper right arm as they were crushed between our bodies. The vampire went flying back into the air, just in time to crash into Steve Ellison, who came tearing around the corner following on his ally’s heels. If Ellison had been braced for it, the impact wouldn’t have affected him, but one of his feet was off of the ground when the body hit. Ellison dropped a machete as he was torn off his feet by gravity, momentum, and surprise.

I was stumbling now, and the vampire behind me was coming up fast, so I threw myself around the corner of the alley that Steve Ellison had just emerged from. It wasn’t smooth, but I tucked my head and landed on the back of my shoulder and kept rolling down the curve of my back without shooting myself, and I had a moment where there was a brick corner between the charging vampire and me. Then I had another moment because he had to slow down or overshoot the corner drastically. Momentum doesn’t stop working because a vampire is faster than a human—if anything, it’s worse.

I came to my feet, adjusting my grip on the sawed-off
shotgun just as a short red-haired vampire came lunging awkwardly around the corner, bracing it with his right hand in an attempt to slow his hurtling body down. The vampire tried to yank his head back before I pulled the trigger, but nobody is that fast. His head disappeared.

It wasn’t a textbook decapitation, but he wasn’t coming back.

A darting shadow in the corner of my eye was the only warning I had when the fourth vampire leaped at me from an adjacent roof. The tall vampire’s keening and the sound of the shotgun and the rising warm air carrying scent particles upward had masked her attack. Turning my head slightly behind me while my body leaped forward, I had a brief impression of long brown hair flailing through the air and a hand taloned with long red nails coming at my eyes from above. I didn’t try to brace myself but grabbed the vampire’s extended wrist while still hurling myself forward, pulling her wrist as I did so.

She was still moving faster than me, but when her hurtling body overtook me from behind and above, I rolled her over my shoulder instead of being knocked off of my feet. Holding on to her right wrist, I guided her body and drove her head down into the pavement at an angle with all of my strength, all of her momentum, and our combined body weight coming down on top of it.

Her neck snapped.

This was good news. Spinal regeneration is trickier than that of mere flesh. It usually takes a while for the nerve impulses to work properly again. The female was out of it for at least five to ten minutes, and the tall one still hadn’t regrown his eyes, if his screaming was any indication. The holy water had continued to eat away at his optic nerves after penetrating the soft flesh of his iris and cornea.

The problem was Ellison. Inhumanly fast, relatively uninjured Steve Ellison, the dumbass vampire who had started the whole thing. He had scrambled to his feet with his inhuman speed and picked up the machete while I was distracted and was now bearing down on me with it. I didn’t have time to draw my knife. My only hope was to either throw myself backward or deflect the flat of the blade with a forearm or palm, and I was in a bad position for either, feet flat and awkwardly hunched forward. I don’t know if I would have made it without losing a hand or an arm or not. I never found out because a spear flew over my shoulder and went through the front of Ellison’s chest.

It was a beautiful, powerful throw. The metal tip of the spear punched straight through his breastbone and out the other side, leaving the wooden shaft of the spear bisecting what was left of his heart. The thing that had once been named Steve Ellison remained standing for another second with an undignified expression of surprise and protest on its face, then dropped bonelessly.

I looked over my shoulder in the direction that the spear had come from. At that angle, the only vantage point high enough for that spear to have originated from was a bank building at least a quarter of a mile away. I couldn’t see anything on it, but I’m not sure I would have even assuming there was something to see. Unlike the eyesight of whoever had hurled that spear, my long-distance vision isn’t any better than a normal human’s.

I did hear something, however. It was the voice of the blonde from the bar, carried on a slight breeze. “I’m a Valkyrie.”

5

I
had finished staking the vampires and was searching their bodies when Sig came walking down the alley. None of the vampires was carrying a wallet, though the red-haired one had a set of car keys in his back pocket and the female had a cell phone. Sig approached at a leisurely pace and plucked her spear from the bald vampire’s devastated chest. That was when I noticed that the bottom end of the spear—the wooden end—had been sharpened into a stake.

There was no chance of his coming back; his heart had already evaporated.

I quickly ran through a mental Rolodex of what I knew about Valkyries, which wasn’t much. The Valkyries’ official title in ancient times was “Choosers of the Slain.” Essentially Viking battle angels, the Valkyries would fly over fields of war on winged horses and gather the souls of brave warriors who had died. These lucky souls would be taken to Viking heaven, a huge beer hall called Valhalla where they would drink and train for a war that was going to happen between good and evil at the end of time. As I recalled, quite a few Valkyries—Brynhild
being the only one whose name I could remember because of that whole opera connection—had been exiled to earth for various crimes or screwups, and they had mated with heroes and had children and died, usually tragically.