Charming (17 page)

We didn’t talk about anything significant after that. After a slightly awkward silence, Cahill asked a few questions about what Dvornik had looked like while we hauled his unconscious body out of the vampire lair and back to his studio, about how Sig had reacted, about when and where we were all supposed to get together again. I asked him a few questions about how Clayburg looked from a cop’s point of view, and he got me to tell him a few things about the Knights Templar that didn’t violate any oaths on my part.

An hour later he left with Tracy.

I watched them leave and thought that Cahill was right: I really ought to be polishing something.

13

S
ig was waiting for me when I got off work, sitting shotgun in a Nissan Versa parked outside the ass end of Rigby’s. The driver was the short stocky woman who had said the blessing and sprinkled holy water in the alley. April nights are chilly in the Blue Ridge, but this woman was dressed for winter, wearing thick blue mittens and a puffed-up pink parka and a green beanie with thick earflaps. What little I could see of her face was obscured by a thick pair of round mirrored glasses, so all I could really tell was that she had healthy pink cheekbones and a strong jaw.

They both stepped out of the car to greet me. It was at this point that I saw the plain but huge silver cross—at least nine inches long—hanging from the driver’s neck, draped outside her parka.

“It’s three thirty in the morning,” I growled. “I’m nocturnal. What’s your excuse?”

“I don’t need an excuse,” Sig snapped back, adding a few words that you can’t say on network television. She obviously wasn’t in a great mood either. “My
reason
for being here is that a certain pain in the ass needs to get a cell phone.”

Not only can cell phones be tracked and listened in on, but black arts can do things with cell phones using sympathetic magic that scare the bejeezus out of me. “Cell phones annoy me,” I said. “And speaking of annoying me, why are you here again?”

Sig opened her mouth to say something, but her friend stepped around the hood of her car and got between us, holding out her right mitten. “I’m Molly Newman,” she said. “I’ve heard a lot about you.”

I stared rudely at her hand for a moment. The reason we hold up our right palms to wave hello is that this is how people used to signify that they weren’t holding a knife in their fighting hand (this is also one of the reasons lefties were considered sneaky and untrustworthy). We clasp right hands on the same principle, and I don’t do it as lightly as normal citizens. Bad mood or not, though, the awareness of being an asshat was starting to creep in around the edges of my perception. I took her hand grudgingly. “Then you know I’m John,” I said. “Your existence has been kept secret from me.”

“Oh for God’s sake,” Sig exploded. “What is your problem?”

“I want you, and it pisses me off,” I said. “Because your friend Cahill just reminded me that I’m not allowed to have things like relationships that might actually mean something in my life.”

Well, maybe I didn’t use those exact words. Maybe what I actually said was, “Forget it. I told you, it’s a full moon tomorrow night.”

“Well, get over your pre-moon syndrome,” Sig retorted. “We’ve got more important things to worry about.”

I felt the geas yank at me like a fishing hook—one that was attached to the chakra behind my navel. It was a sharp, experimental tug that subsided quickly. Apparently I was being given more line.

“What’s happened?” I asked cautiously.

Molly cleared her throat. “Maybe we could talk about this in my car?”

“That depends. Where are you going?” This was just a formality on my part. If they had intended to sell me out to the Knights Templar, I was already standing in the ideal ambush site. It was about twenty-four hours too late to play it smart.

“We’re taking you to meet another member of our little coffee klatch,” Sig informed me, still not asking. I was beginning to realize that the pushy thing was a permanent part of her personality. “Our tech guy. He wants to meet you.”

In other words, there had been a disturbing new development. Let me explain something about my geas. I have a little bit more leeway than most knights with regard to the magical pact that my ancestors entered into. For one thing, the geas was designed to protect supernatural creatures who aren’t a threat to the Pax, and I’m one of those creatures… most of the time. For another, being a quasi-werewolf comes with its own powerful drives, and these sometimes pull in the opposite direction of the demands of my blood oath. These conflicting influences can cause a certain amount of insomnia, but they also give me a little more wiggle room in the free will department.

Before Sig told me that there had been a new development, I probably could have sneaked out of Clayburg with no consequences other than a mild headache. Now that there were hints that I’d be leaving a more serious problem behind though, I had to determine its nature or risk dealing with nightmares, migraines, and the kind of withdrawal symptoms that an addict goes through while detoxing. The geas does not give up easily.

Once, the geas actually made me blind. It lasted for two
weeks, and it was the only thing that kept me from going on a suicide run and hunting down and killing every knight I could find after Alison died.

“Sure,” I said. “Can I put my guitar case in your trunk?”

I could.

Molly’s car was untidy, but not in a public-health-violation kind of way. The backseat was covered with a salmon-colored bed sheet that smelled like dog, and there were a few empty plastic Diet Dr Pepper bottles in the back floor. A tower of CD cases was crammed precariously in the crack between the two front seats, and only the fact that they were jammed so tightly together kept the whole structure from collapsing.

As soon as Molly started the car engine, Harry Connick Jr. came on the CD player singing some song about Santa Claus. I ignored him.

“Pre-moon syndrome?” I said to Sig’s shoulder. “PMS? Really?”

She smirked at me in the rearview mirror. “You don’t like it?”

“That depends,” I said. “Are you going to buy me chocolate and kiss my ass for the next couple of days?”

“You really are in a charming mood tonight,” she observed. Was I imagining the droll emphasis on the
charming
?

“Sig,” Molly chided, a certain note of impatience entering her voice as she turned onto Main Street. “Tell him.”

“Tell me what?” I asked.

Sig told me. “Stanislav had a vision when he tried to tap into the psychic impression the female vampire left behind. He says we have to kill her now. He says she’s bad news.”

“Well duh.”

“No,” she said emphatically, turning in the seat to catch my eye. “Really bad news. The kind that only gets worse.”

“Worse than what we saw today?” I asked skeptically.

“Same kind of bad but on a bigger scale,” Sig amplified.

“You should try holding your spear when you say things like that,” I noted. “Maybe wear a winged helmet and a fur cape too, stand on a mountain peak with a lightning-filled sky as a background. Molly, do you have any opera CDs in that—”

“Stanislav says our smart, newly turned vampire is a teenage girl named Anne Marie who likes shedding blood more than she likes drinking it,” Sig interrupted impatiently. “He says that he’s never gotten a reading as powerful as the one she left behind. He says that he had a vision of her being a black oak, burrowing down in time and spreading her roots beneath the years. The longer she lives, the deeper her evil will spread, and the harder she’ll be to root out.”

Mariah Carey came on the CD player, singing that song about how all she wanted for Christmas was you.

“OK, I know I’ve been a little rude,” I said to Molly. “And I apologize. I really do. You seem like a good person, and you haven’t done anything to me… you just caught me off guard on a bad night. But I really need to know… what’s with the Christmas music? And the parka? And the beanie?”

“I’m celebrating Christmas,” she told me.

“It’s April,” I pointed out, just in case this was necessary.

“Vampires scare me,” she said reasonably. “And Christmas makes me happy.”

“Oh,” I said lamely. “OK.”

We rode in silence for a time after that, or at least we didn’t talk while Molly’s homemade CD continued to play random pseudo-carols. A lot of the music blurred by, but I remember that Blues Traveler did a Christmas song at some point. So did Jonny Lang.

We were past the 81 southbound exit ramp and headed toward the higher elevations outside town when I finally spoke
up over the “skating” song from the Charlie Brown Christmas special. “How sure a thing is Dvornik’s vision?”

“He doesn’t see the future very often,” Sig said matter-of-factly. “Which is good because it takes a lot out of him. You saw that for yourself. Especially when a vision comes to him out of nowhere like today. But when he does get a precognitive flash, he’s dead-on.”

“And how did you get involved in all this?” I asked Molly. “Or is that too personal?”

“I used to be an Episcopal priest,” Molly said. Sig turned slightly and smiled at whatever my expression looked like. “A few years ago Chauncey came to me asking me questions about exorcisms. He’d been hired to exterminate some family property that he was convinced was haunted.”

“Why did he come to you?” I asked. “I thought the Episcopal Church was pretty lightweight in the exorcism department.”

“There’s kind of a don’t ask, don’t tell policy,” she admitted. “They don’t train priests for it in the seminaries, or have specially appointed priests like the Anglican and Catholic churches. The Book of Occasional Services refers to exorcism rites but doesn’t talk about them specifically.”

I nodded. I’d heard stories about a book that passed over the Atlantic when the Episcopalians and the Anglicans split… a book with a limited distribution, to which only bishops are allowed access. It’s supposed to have a major rite of exorcism in it.

“But Molly went with Choo and checked the house out anyway,” Sig said. Her voice was both rueful and affectionate.

“I had seen this show about an Episcopal priest named Andrew Calder who was very vocal about performing exorcisms,” Molly explained. Her voice was detached, not defensive. “I wasn’t sure what I believed, and it made me curious.
And all priests know a minor rite of exorcism. It’s part of the baptism ceremony. And honestly, deep down I thought I was helping an emotionally troubled man, not walking into something truly supernatural.”

“But you were,” I said.

“But I was,” Molly agreed cheerfully. “And I haven’t been entirely right in the head since, if you want to know the truth.”

Sig was quick to rush to Molly’s defense. “When Molly holds a holy symbol, it packs a punch like nothing I’ve ever seen. I saw her knock a draugr back like it had been hit by a bus. Literally. She broke its neck just by holding a cross up. She can still make holy water by blessing it too.”

They saw a draugr? I let that one go.

“But you’re not an ordained priest anymore?” I asked. I was thinking of Choo and how he’d been complaining about being ordained in two or three different made-up religions and still unable to make holy water.

“I’m not a practicing priest,” Molly said. “And your next question
is
too personal.”

“OK,” I said.

We went back to letting the music make all the noise for another five minutes or so. This time it was Molly who started speaking. “I had a nervous breakdown,” she said. “I still performed my duties as a priest, but I felt like too much of a fake after that.”

Sig patted Molly’s arm and turned back to glare at me as if I were interrogating her friend ruthlessly. “Remember how I told you most ghosts aren’t all the way in our world? She and Choo ran into an evil spirit. A fully sentient one.”

I winced. Intelligent geists are the worst. They have a way of getting inside your head—well, not mine, because of the geas,
but you know what I mean—and using your fears and insecurities like a piñata.

Molly ignored both of us. “When I first became a priest, it was really me up there in front of the congregation,” she continued. “I kept a lot of thoughts and emotions to myself… I mean, of course I did… everybody has a secret self… but I was comfortable with it. But after I broke down, there was this gap between the me standing up there telling people how to live their life and the real me, and it made me feel terrible. I never stopped believing in God, but somehow that made needing Paxil worse. I was preaching about faith, and I couldn’t trust God enough to sleep at night.”