Charming (8 page)

“We can’t just make them disappear,” the cop said. “Look at that girl’s clothes. She’s probably from the college. She’ll be missed.”

“What was she doing back here?” Sig wondered.

“That fat guy with the lip rings is Heath Cline,” the cop replied. “He’s a drug dealer, so we’ll make this look like a deal gone bad. I don’t know who the guy in the hoodie is, but he didn’t get that rank just missing one shower, so if we put that machete in his hands we can hack up the bite marks and give Cline the sawed-off…”

I would have stayed to hear more, but the hairs on my neck and arms and legs all went stiff. I can always tell when ghosts and geists are around. All animals can. Oh, shut up. I think most people can sense spirits, actually, but they’re conditioned to ignore or tune out any feelings that they don’t have a rational explanation for, and a minute later they forget the feeling ever happened. I don’t know if that’s the Pax in action or human nature or both.

When I got all pimply and tingly, I froze into hyper-alertness. Something was up. Something was moving in or moving out or materializing, and the temperature dropped the way it does when disembodied presences are manifesting in an area. Sig had said she could speak to the dead. Was it possible that she could use ghosts as scouts or spies?

Or sometimes ghosts return to scenes of traumatic death, and the bodies in the alley were being set to rest by someone who seemed to know what she was doing. Maybe the priest was saying bye-bye to a ghost who wasn’t quite ready to go?

Regardless, my instincts were screaming at me that something was going on, and I had no idea what it was or how to find out, so I got the hell out of there.

If I had heard screams by the time I got back to my car, I might have turned back, but I didn’t.

What I heard was Sig saying, “Hey, you.”

7

T
he house I was renting was on the outskirts of Clayburg, roughly ten minutes into the neighboring county. Ten minutes doesn’t sound like much, but my nearest neighbors were two miles away and woods surrounded my house on three sides. This sort of isolation tends to make people from big cities anxious, but the privacy makes me feel safer. I like to hear what’s coming without a lot of distracting background noise.

My abode is unremarkable-looking, an old brick farmhouse built during the 1930s and later covered with tan aluminum siding. It has two floors, one small story layered on top of the larger bottom one like a wedding cake, and a basement that was basically a root cellar when I moved in. I’d since poured concrete over the cellar’s foundation and layered cinder-block walls around its sides.

I’d made other improvements too.

One of the selling points for me had been that the house had a gravel driveway. This was important because I bought a couple hundred feet of the cheapest PVC pipe I could find,
then filled the sections with salt one by one and connected them until they formed a perimeter around my house. Digging under a paved driveway would have been a serious inconvenience when I made a foot-deep trench to bury the pipe in. Eventually I had an unbroken salt ring surrounding my house that couldn’t be blown away by the wind or scuffed by the boot of a nosy neighbor, and salt rings are a natural barrier to certain types of supernatural menace.

All magic works symbolically to some degree, and salt is a powerful symbol, ancient and instinctively recognized on a level so subconscious that most of us aren’t even aware it exists. According to folklore from the Middle Ages, salt is a symbol of purity, just like silver. This is a load of crap, although if enough people believe it for long enough, it might take on a truth of its own. What you have to remember about the Middle Ages is that after the Gregorian edicts, everyone acted as if anything related to the flesh was evil, but salt is actually a much older symbol of the body, or of having a body if you want to get technical. When everything else is gone from the human body, the last thing left is salt. When we want to preserve meat, we salt it. Salt is in the sweat we sweat and the blood we bleed. It is an intrinsic part of us, and we know this from infancy from the first time we taste our own tears. We know it even without words to express the knowing.

This is why an unbroken line of salt (circles work best because continuous cycles are a powerful symbol of life) functions as a defense against supernatural menaces that don’t have physical bodies. Even a spirit that is possessing a material body will hesitate before crossing an unbroken barrier of salt, because unless it is an extremely powerful spirit that has occupied the body for a very long time, it will wind up performing an impromptu exorcism on itself.

Supernatural beings with their own material bodies, however, such as vampires, werewolves, zombies, ghouls, and so on, will cross salt barriers without a second thought, which is why I had a second layer of defense. As soon as I was alone with my new house, I began methodically removing sections of the aluminum siding, drawing crosses on the brick walls, and then replacing the siding. It’s easy. All you need is a utility knife and some sealant. I repeated this process all around the house.

I have personally seen Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, Muslim, and Tibetan symbols work on undead creatures, but only when the person who had drawn them was sincere in their faith. Because I’ve seen this and sincerely believe that there is a higher power that a lot of people see from different perspectives, I can use just about any holy symbol and make it work as long as the religion doesn’t worship pantheons or practice rituals that I personally think are evil. Crosses work best for me, though, probably because I was raised Catholic.

In any case, holy symbols work against supernatural menaces that are… well, unholy. These are mostly beings who have been summoned to a false semblance of life by death magic, or necromancy. Holy symbols represent a force that is life beyond life, something that always has been and always will be. Necromancy is an obscene parody of that force, an act that represents the ultimate lack of faith in it.

The aluminum siding covering the holy symbols on my house shortens their area of effect but doesn’t negate them. If you had to see a holy symbol for it to work, vampires could just close their eyes. If you had to know the holy symbol was there and understand what it represented, then zombies could wander into a church and never care less.

This suggests, by the way, that on some level all minds and souls are linked in ways that we don’t consciously understand.
If a symbol is powerful enough, sometimes we know things are there even if we don’t know things are there. Lots of religions and psychologies and philosophies talk about this sort of thing. Feel free to read about some of them.

If anything does get past my outer defenses, I have a few other bells and whistles inside the house—and I mean that literally. Among some of the other defenses I’ve set up are actual bells and whistles, but the perimeter defenses are my main priority.

Once inside my house, I made my way straight to the Japanese sword that hangs by the living room woodstove. It isn’t silver steel, but the katana is a traditionally forged Japanese sword, not some stainless steel knockoff ordered out of a catalog. My sword was blessed by its maker, who was both smith and priest, and I slung the sheathed blade over my shoulder before continuing on to the kitchen.

While it was bizarre that an out-of-control idiot like Steve Ellison had managed to scrape even three followers together, it would be a mistake to assume that we had killed his entire hive. The father I never knew had made a mistake like that. Michael Charming killed a lycanthrope thinking it was a lone wolf, and because my father was distracted with worry about an overdue pregnant wife, he was not as careful as he should have been and the werewolf’s pack tracked him back to his home. Letting my dying father see that his pregnant wife had been bitten and infected with a virus that was sure to kill both her and his unborn child painfully was a conscious act of cruelty. That one lapse was the last mistake my father ever made. Well, there are some who believe that I’m the last mistake my father ever made, but you get my point.

The katana was staying within reach until the sun came up.

I keep my fridge and my pantry stocked, and the third shelf
down was crammed with homemade sandwiches. I plucked out eight from the left side, where slices of venison and Monterey Jack cheese and a light sprinkling of horseradish were tucked between split loaves of Italian onion bread. Werewolves burn calories faster than humans under normal circumstances, but when they’ve been exerting themselves beyond normal human limits and healing, they go through food like bipedal locusts.

After the fourth sandwich I was calm enough to locate a big bottle of spicy hot V8 juice and tilt it to my mouth. When I was done I scooped a paper plate full of fried chicken out of the fridge and made my way toward the cot I keep in the basement. I’m not particularly fond of sleeping in the basement, but it has one safety door for an entrance, no windows, and a narrow stairwell that’s easy to defend.

I knew I was going to have to move again, but I was paying my current landlord under the table for “tax purposes” and trying to trace my address from Trevor Barnes’s information would prove impossible. Sig’s group didn’t seem overtly hostile. The fact that she knew my first name freaked me out, but it’s not like I don’t come across things I can’t explain fairly regularly. I figured I could spare one day to get out of Clayburg properly.

I hate burning up emergency identities before I’ve had a chance to set up any others. That’s one of the ways knights get you. They force you to use up resources like safe places, false identities, and ready money faster than you can replenish them, until you’re living day-to-day and hand-to-mouth, desperately reacting to whatever comes your way instead of carefully planning in advance. Despite the way I’d had to leave Alaska, I’d lived there long enough to make provisions. My time in Clayburg was a bust.

But there was nothing I could do about that. I had a deadline
pressing on the back of my neck, emphasis on
dead
, and my focus was off, so I skipped the isometric exercises and the Krav Maga practice and sank down into a cross-legged Sukhasana position.

Meditation is important when you don’t age normally. Post-traumatic stress disorder is caused by shutting down and putting anxiety and stress somewhere else while in crisis mode—sometimes from one intense experience and sometimes from prolonged stress over a period of years. Make that decades or centuries and you have serious problems. Last-train-to-Nutville-type problems.

The thing about sitting meditation for a guy like me is that it isn’t soothing or transcendent. I don’t picture myself in a temple of white light, untouchable and undistracted. Emotions come roiling up, and I just try to let them pass through me, concentrating on my breathing or moving my focus through different parts of my body. I rarely come out of it feeling peaceful though I sometimes feel drained, which can be just as good. Sometimes I meditate outside in cold air and find myself sweating. Occasionally I find realizations about things I’ve been worrying about sitting on my mental doorstep, with no clue how they got there. Tonight wasn’t one of those times.

Finally I let myself crawl onto my cot and passed out as soon as my head hit the pillow. Despite my best efforts to defuse my subconscious, it still blew up in my dreams. There was a nightmare about the bald vampire cutting my arms off, only this time he was using my katana instead of a machete. Another dream featured a variation on the amputation theme—as I kept growing extra fur-covered limbs out of my body, a disgusted Sig kept burning them off me with her magic. Then there was one where I was in a new house starting a new life, but when I looked out the window I realized that I’d just moved into a
house overlooking a river made of fiery snakes. I mentioned that I was raised Catholic, right?

My favorite was the recurring nightmare where I kept dreaming that I was finally changing into a wolf. I have this dream with increasing frequency and intensity every time a full moon comes close. This particular night I had it several times, and every single time I woke up with my heart pounding so hard that I was convinced the dream was real, that I really was in the process of changing right then and there.