Charming (19 page)

Sig was suddenly beside me, sticking an arm out across my chest as I lunged forward. It felt like a steel beam. I stopped, still watching Parth as he regained his equilibrium. Bronze scales began to emerge from under his skin and overlap, forming a type of epidermal chain mail. His pupils expanded until his eyes were solid black orbs, and his jaws elongated. His limbs and torso telescoped until he was at least seven feet tall, and I knew that if he opened his mouth, fangs longer and narrower than any vampire’s would be revealed at each corner.

It actually could have been worse. Naga combat forms can be pretty freakish. I once met a naga who could turn his arms into long thick snapping snakes. I’ve seen illustrations of nagas who had the upper torsos of men and whose lower halves were long giant snake bodies ending in barbed tails.

For her part, Sig didn’t seem impressed. “Don’t kill him, John,” she said angrily as she glared at Parth. “The idiot is just playing some kind of game with you.”

“Maybe,” I said, my voice shaking with adrenaline and rage. There are all kinds of conflicting stories about nagas—sometimes they’re good, sometimes they’re evil, sometimes they eat humans, sometimes they’re ascetics who stick to seafood—but there are at least four points on which most stories agree: (1) Nagas live near water. (2) Nagas have forked tongues no matter what form they’re using. (3) Nagas are avaricious collectors of knowledge and treasure. (4) It is never, ever a good idea to piss a naga off. The best-case scenario is that they’ll just use
their water-shifting abilities to cause drought or floods in your region. The worst-case scenario is… well… I was looking at it.

“Or maybe,” I snarled, “he knows how much I’d be worth to the Knights Templar now that you’ve been telling my story to everyone you know.”

“I only told people I trust. Parth isn’t like that,” Sig said, but her voice lacked 100 percent conviction. Molly was nowhere to be seen.

“Then get him to stop,” I said grimly. “Or get out of my way.”

“PARTH!” Sig barked angrily. “Cut it out!”

In answer, fog suddenly coalesced around us, so thick that I couldn’t see six inches in front of my face, and I was under Sig’s arm and running toward Parth before she could do more than grab the tail end of my wet jean jacket. She was left holding the entire jacket, cursing.

Parth tried to lose himself in his homemade cloud cover, first darting left, then up the stairs behind him to the next level, but I followed with my ears and nose. He was backpedaling and I was running forward, so I was close enough to see him as a silhouette within seconds, and by that time the silver steel knife was in my hand.

Suddenly the mist between our faces parted as if invisible hands had pulled open a set of window drapes. I found myself staring straight into his eyes, and for the briefest of moments I felt that itch I get behind my forehead when supernatural creatures try to dominate me mentally. I swished my knife past his nose to disrupt his concentration, careful not to actually nick him. Nagas have poisonous blood, and if I was going to risk getting some on me it wouldn’t be for a slice. “Last chance to stop this,” I growled.

In answer, the fog closed between our faces again, and fat
beads of water began to condense and gather on my face and crawl toward my nose and mouth.

I feinted, and he tried to trap my wrist as if it were holding a knife, but all that did was tell me that he couldn’t see through the fog he’d summoned any better than I could.

My knife wasn’t in my knife hand any more. I homed in on his throat and thrust the knife toward his carotid artery with my left hand instead.

Here’s a little tip: when facing a humanoid being who regenerates rapidly—and nagas are at the top of that particular pyramid, regrowing entire lost limbs in less than a minute—go for the carotid artery and keep hacking or choking. You won’t kill them, but all you have to do is interrupt the blood’s flow to the brain long enough for them to pass out. Regeneration might repair damage, but it doesn’t make you wake up from a nap any faster than anybody else.

By this point, incidentally, the fog was thinning as rivulets of water condensed and streamed over my face and poured down my nose and throat, putting pressure on my tracheal passage to open as they gathered and began to reassemble into a living tendril. I had maybe another second or two before I started drowning standing up.

The bad news was that Parth blocked my knife thrust. The good news was that he did it by crossing his scaly forearms and catching my wrist in the V they formed, pushing the V upward so that my knife thrust went straight up and I was pulled slightly to the side. He was hoping to use his superior height and strength to pull me up off my feet, but he wasn’t used to dealing with someone as fast as he was.

The natural inclination in this situation was to grasp the knife tighter, but I’d been broken of that habit by a knight who wielded a bamboo pole the way a nun uses a ruler. This
particular instructor used to call the instinct to clutch a weapon while your hand was being immobilized the
monkey trap
. In India, hunters who want to trap monkeys will hollow out coconuts and leave a hole just big enough for a monkey’s hand to fit through. Then they’ll put some sweet rice in the coconut. The monkey will reach into the coconut and grab the sweet rice, making its fist too big to get back out of the hole, trapping itself. It never occurs to the monkey to let go of the rice… their brains just aren’t wired that way.

I abandoned the knife immediately, letting go so that my fist became a flat palm that slipped through the vise Parth was trying to make with his wrists. His hands, which were pulling upward, were suddenly and unexpectedly encountering no resistance and shot up over his head, leaving his torso completely unguarded and his feet flat on the ground. I went with the motion as I surged downward onto my back foot, tilting my torso down toward the ground as I shot a side kick up into Parth’s midriff before he could bring his hands down or jump back. I tried to drive my heel up all the way through his stomach. Kicking his scaly skin was like kicking Kevlar, but he was lifted off of the ground and sent backward into the air, smashing into one of his high-tech glass tables at the same time that my gag reflex started.

Parth’s body went straight through the glowing tabletop and into the plastic frame on the far side, smashing through it. I don’t know what kind of circuitry was running through that glass and that frame, but there was a bright ozone-burning flash, and then the lights went out as Parth and I collapsed simultaneously. The difference was that I was still conscious, even if I was convulsively vomiting what felt like a couple of gallons of water through my mouth and nose. Parth was inert.

Electricity, by the by, is another good bet against creatures
who regenerate quickly. It may not keep their flesh from regrowing like a continuous flame will but a large-enough jolt will mess with their brain activity and cause their systems to shut down.

A lot of knights carry illegally amped-up Tasers and cattle prods for this reason. I’d had to leave one behind in Alaska myself.

“PARTH!” Kimi screamed, rushing forward as the last of the fog thinned into transparent wisps and a backup generator kicked in and caused the room lights to come back on. She didn’t seem to care that Parth’s prostrate form was still in his hybrid snake mode, and would have rushed to him if Sig hadn’t stopped her. At least the ruins of the table frame weren’t sparking.

I dragged my own waterlogged carcass off my knees and rose, coughing, to my feet. Sig walked around the wreckage of the table, inspecting the fragments carefully for sparks. Then she hauled Parth’s body away from the remains of the table with one hand, grabbing him by the wrist and unceremoniously slinging his body across the room as if it were a bag of flour. I realized that I was holding the knife again, having somehow grabbed it unconsciously even while I was throwing up. I pointed it away from her as she walked around to me.

“Are you all right?” she asked, half patting, half thumping me between the shoulder blades.

“Is
he
all right?” Kimi demanded hysterically, rushing to Parth’s side and slapping his cheeks.

“Parth will wake up soon if you stop mauling him, Kimi,” Sig said unsympathetically. “It would take a wood chipper to take him out.”

“But he’s not breathing,” she fretted, and something in her voice made me think of all those Asian subcultures and communities that still believe that they are the descendants of nagas
and humans. Nagaland, a small province in the northeast section of India, is the most obvious example.

I splut—and yes, I just made that word up—another coffee cup’s worth of water out of my nose and mouth and gasped, “Nagas have a low heart rate.” I wasn’t sure why I was trying to reassure her. I had a feeling that Parth could have dissected me on the dining room table and Kimi would have been put out with me for bleeding on the tablecloth. After another breath I added, “They’re cold-blooded.”

Both of those statements were true, but when I implied that Parth was breathing and that Kimi just couldn’t tell, I was lying. I don’t hear heartbeats, but I
can
hear them. What I mean is, most of the time I unconsciously shut heartbeats out the same way people who live near airports stop hearing airplanes. If I didn’t, I’d go crazy. Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” kind of crazy. But when I consciously focus—which I was doing at that particular moment—I can hear heartbeats, and Parth was legally dead.

On the other hand, I was also confident that his body would be coming back online soon, and I was too busy coughing water out of my windpipe to explain why. As far as I know, the only thing that will truly kill a naga is completely burning it down to ash or dissolving it in acid or severing the connection between its brain and its body through decapitation. And even then I’d burn or dissolve the head just to be safe. If anything could survive decapitation, a naga could, and I’ve never tested that limit.

At this point Molly came walking back into the room carrying an elephant gun that was almost as long as she was tall. “Here,” Molly said, handing the enormous double-barreled rifle to Sig. “I think this thing would snap my spine if I tried to fire it.”

“Parth keeps this monster loaded?” Sig asked dubiously, taking the massive rifle by the stock with one hand.

“All the weapons in his weapons room are loaded,” Molly said serenely, producing a World War II Mauser C96 that had been slung carelessly over her shoulder. “I’ve always liked this one. It looks like a
Star Wars
blaster.”

I’ve used Mausers before; they were the guns of choice among knights in the first half of the twentieth century, at least until the .357 Magnum came along—but glancing at the exotic-looking long-barreled semiautomatic, I had to admit that Molly had a point. She also had the gun on safety. I reached over to the left side of the hammer and gently changed the setting. She had probably gotten confused by the selector switch next to the trigger guard.

And yeah, it probably would have been a better idea to leave the gun on safety and not say anything, but Molly had just tried to come through for me. I have my faults, but letting an ally walk around thinking she has a weapon that works when it doesn’t isn’t one of them.

“That gun can fire more rounds a minute than its barrel can handle,” I told her. “So fire short bursts if you actually have to use that thing. But don’t fire it around Parth unless you’re a good distance away or you figure death is better than being taken alive.”

“Why not?” Molly asked, her wise, childish eyes serene and big behind her glasses.

“Naga blood is poisonous,” I explained. “Splattering bits of Parth all over the place would be a quick death for you and Kimi.”

“What about you and Sig?” Molly asked.

I glanced over at Sig. “I don’t know.”

This wasn’t entirely true. The one time I got naga blood on me, I wiped it off with a wet rag figuring that I’d be fine since it hadn’t landed on any open wounds. I was able to function for several hours before spending the next day burning up in a
delirium of sweating, vomiting, and cramping. OK, fine, I lost control of my bowels too. Satisfied?

“So those guns are useless,” Kimi said eagerly.

I shrugged. “They’re a last resort.”

Molly accepted my statement without acknowledging it one way or another. Instead, she turned to Kimi. “Do you know why Parth attacked John?”

“Parth is your friend,” Kimi said tearfully, which I took to mean no. She went on: “Why are you taking this stranger’s side? Maybe Parth recognized him from somewhere and was trying to save you.”

“Every time we’ve ever come here, Parth was waiting for us in the greeting room with refreshments ready,” Sig said tiredly. “But tonight he made sure he was surrounded by water.”

Sig continued to tick points off with her tone rather than her fingers. “He was in the one room where he could toss that water around and not cause a lot of property damage. And he was almost naked so he could shape-shift quickly. Face it, Kimi, Parth planned this in advance, which means he had plenty of time to warn me. He didn’t tell me what he was doing because he knew I wouldn’t go along with it.”

Kimi didn’t say anything.

I glanced at Sig with a certain amount of respect. She had worked that out fast. I decided to let her take the lead in handling Parth when he woke up. I was the one he had attacked, but Sig was the one whose trust he had betrayed. She was also the one holding the big-ass gun.

And the truth is, I was curious. I wanted to see what she would do.

A second later Sig looked at me pensively and said, “Let’s take him to the crematory.”

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