Charmed I'm Sure (2 page)

A campsite was a couple of hundred yards away from the ring, set up by an old logging trail. Enough camping gear for at least three people was strewn all about. Empty backpacks, fishing gear, a Sierra Club cooking kit, a foldable grill, some empty beer cans, that sort of thing. The bones of some kind of fish were scattered over the remains of the campfire, and a large all-weather Coleman tent was fully assembled and staked to the ground.

The tent smelled like cannabis and alcohol and sex and honeysuckle and milk.

About fifteen feet to the side, I found three hunting rifles with broken stocks and bent barrels. Someone—a very strong someone—had smashed the rifles against a tree. Presumably it was the same person who owned the motorcycle.

A scream sounded then, a rupture in that night's terrible calm. It was like a crack in a dam: the scream was a relatively small thing, really, but there was a sense of some vast and powerful pressure on the other side of it. The voice of the adult male who had made the sound was hoarse and lacking any pretense of aggression or composure.

I headed for the direction of the sound, ignoring the scent trails. Something had been running people around in circles, and I could have sorted the overlapping smells out by gradients of intensity, but it would have taken time. And then I caught the odor of blood and death, recent and raw. I veered to the right and found another man. This one had actually managed to pull on a pair of jeans before whatever the hell was happening had started happening, and like the blond, he bore the tattoo of a United States Marine.

Unlike the blond, he had been crucified on a tree.

The palms of his hands had been hammered onto the stumps of broken branches after bullets had punctured his torso. I've seen ritual sacrifices before, and this did not have the feel of one. It's a hard quality to describe—hard on many levels—but such sacrifices are made by psychopaths who are getting a sexual charge the only way they know how, or else by sociopaths who think that they are asking rewards of vast and unforgiving powers. In either case, the perpetrator usually has an overinflated sense of their own self-worth and a highly developed sense of drama; great care is taken in presentation, from the positioning of the body to the policing of the surrounding area.

This seemed more like the man had been pinned to the tree as an afterthought, like a note to a bulletin board. Someone was coming back to pick him up later. Someone given to cruel and random impulses.

I left him there and kept moving toward the sounds of a living man, a terrified one thrashing through woods in the dark. When the commotion halted in a sudden scream and a sound of impact, I stopped to listen more carefully. In the silence that followed, a distinctly feminine voice began speaking. It was a beautiful voice, all melted gold and malice. “What happened to my big brave soldier? Who is this terrified little boy in front of me?”

The man's response was weak, halting. I had the impression that the only reason he wasn't screaming was that the wind had been knocked out of him. “What…what…the hell are you?”

“Now you want to understand me, Eric? Is this what it takes? Dead friends and a gun pointed at your chest?”

Her words did not inspire him to embark on an intense round of philosophical self-examination. “What are you?” Eric repeated.

I began moving again, quietly.

“I've spent a lot of time trying to figure that out myself,” the voice mused, clearly enjoying itself. “A lot of people who study the old stories seem to think I represent the male fear of untamed female sexuality. What do you think?”

That was a few too many big words for Eric under the current circumstances. Maybe under any circumstances. I never did see him at his best.

“Why are you doing this?” Eric begged. His breath was coming back in rapid, shallow gasps.

I could almost hear the shrug. “Because I can't fit more than one lover on the back of my bike, and I liked Isaac better than you.” A giggle then, chilling in its lightheartedness. “The truth is, Eric, you picked the wrong night to skimp on the foreplay.”

I made it to an opening in the branches where I could see them both clearly in the moonlight. She was facing away from me in a large clearing, nude, her long golden hair covering the cleft of her buttocks. Her arms and shoulders were slender but conveyed a sense of great strength, perhaps from the effortless way she held a Thompson machine gun one-handed and leveled at the man beneath her. I couldn't see her face, but I suspected it was inhumanly beautiful.

Eric was scrambling on his back, elbows and heels digging for purchase while she pursued him at a leisurely pace. He was a short but heavily muscled man with a broad hairy chest and thick stubby legs, wearing a pair of olive-green boxers. He was looking up at her imploringly, still in the denial or bargaining stage, but the expression was thinly plastered over half-crazed fear and rage.

I had a sense that she was going to begin punctuating her comments with bursts of gunfire, but a noise stopped me just as I was about to move decisively in her direction. No, not a noise—lots of noises, the same sounds from multiple locations: earth shifting and seething, loose rocks settling or scattering down, roots tearing while snuffling grunts filled the air.

Something was boiling up through the soil.

“And
you
out there.” Perhaps she turned to look at me then, but if she did, I never saw it. I had already begun running back into the forest and only heard her words because my hearing is exceptional. I didn't have a specific destination in mind, just somewhere not in the middle of a converging circle of burrowing things. “I don't recall inviting you to my party.”

I ran into the first of the whatever-the-hells some ten feet further back. Its form was not clear in shadow, but it was black and small and mole-like and was releasing a rancid odor into the air. There was a distinct gleam of tusks and, unfortunately, the thing was growing, swelling rapidly as it emerged from the ground. A chance scattering of moonlight beams grouped like buckshot revealed worms and beetles swarming up the creature's legs and disappearing into its skin; the thing was absorbing insect life from the earth and adding it to its own mass, merging flesh with flesh in an unholy marriage.

I should have brought my Japanese long sword along, and to hell with what any highway patrolmen or hikers would have thought. Hell, I should have kept the ax.

The creature was also in the process of shifting from four legs to two. Its torso was straightening, its forelegs becoming arms as it braced itself for battle, arms that were thickening with twisted muscle while claws lengthened at the end of its…hands? Black wrinkled skin seemed to be sprouting a protective armor of thick fur.

Using the wooden pike like a lance, I hit the thing dead center while it was roughly human sized. There is a vulnerable spot in almost all humanoids that is shielded by neither muscle nor bone, a softball-sized pocket beneath that place where the rib cage splits, between breastbone and stomach muscles. This area is protected by nothing but a thin covering of skin, and I impaled the creature there, knocking it back and actually vaulting over it when my pike went all the way through its torso and made contact with the ground on the way down. I released the pike and kept running, leaving the thing to die messily and loudly behind me.

God damned Fae. And do I not take God's name lightly or in vain there, assuming that he, she, it, we, or they exists. Some believe that the Fae are the bastard children of fallen angels, the Nephilim mentioned in Genesis. Personally, I have my doubts, but even if it is not true, the Fae are close enough to demonic that I don't see much point quibbling. It is a common practice among them to call on old alliances or make new ones with any magical beings they encounter when they move into new territory. The creature I had just disabled was a buggane, a burrowing nocturnal thing that can change into an ogre-like being. Their kind have a longstanding agreement with the Fae—buggane were often thugs or enforcers for faeries in the old stories—and such pacts do not weaken with the passage of mere centuries.

Three more beings were disrupting sound and soil, two to the west and one to the east. I headed east. The bow was no good to me in the night among the thick cover of trees, so I dropped it and its store of arrows where they would be easy to find again, near the reeking beast I had just mortally wounded. Instead I pulled the Ruger from its holster and my knife from its sheath.

The next buggane that emerged to block my way was fully shifted, at least eight feet tall, though it was difficult to tell because it was a silhouette of thick, sloping shoulders and a wide massive head. The thing was a wall of darkness, a landslide of fangs and claws waiting to happen. But it had answered the summons of some kind of female nymph, and that meant it was probably male. If so, it had at least one easy target under its fur: little Buggane Jr. hanging out with the boys on the corner of Thigh and Groin.

I'm talking about its penis.

Anyhow, I shot the buggane in the right wrong place.

The monster
was
male. It lowered its head and hunched its shoulders and pulled its arms inward in the universal gesture of belated protectiveness, which loosened its neck muscles and made it easier for me to backslash its carotid artery from the side as I darted by. The buggane didn't follow me.

I had left a piece of my right forearm behind on one of its tusks, but it wasn't an important piece. Nothing that would make me drop my knife anyway. I kept moving in a wide turn that would take me back toward the remaining two. I couldn't track them by sound anymore, not with the screaming of the one I'd impaled confusing everything, but I could still smell them.

Could I ever smell them. Theirs was a sour, powerful stench, and if it hadn't been for the adrenaline, I might have had a hard time functioning.

One of the pursuing buggane had gotten ahead of the other, which was good. I straightened my knees and shoulder-feinted upward as if I were going to leap up at it, then ducked under its high slashing swing and brought my foot down on the outside of its ankle at an angle while I ran past. The buggane didn't spend the majority of its time walking on two legs, and I caught it flat-footed with most of its massive weight already bearing down on that ankle. The joint snapped inward.

The buggane uttered a foul, guttural word and collapsed as I left it behind, still running for all I was worth. The word was a human expression and seemed out of place coming from that mouth.

The last buggane standing paused, likely taken aback by the fact that it was no longer part of a pursuing pack. That was a mistake. There was a loud metallic click quite different from the dwindling sounds made by the dying and injured. Perhaps my immediate opponent's hearing wasn't as good as mine, or perhaps it didn't know what that clicking sound meant.

Either way, I darted to the left of the buggane, putting its massive body between me and the glade. It rotated to track me and bent its knees slightly. If this was an invitation for me to come in close, it was one I had no intention of accepting. Then the buggane stiffened as the bullets that had managed to make their way past tree trunks and branches tore through leaves to rip off bits of its left ear and thudded into its left neck and shoulder. The buggane twisted and contorted, its second mistake, and other bullets found that place where skull and spine join.

Bugganes do not have any special immunity against lead. My last hairy attacker dropped, and the firing stopped. Somewhere, a trigger continued to depress with dry futility. The Thompson submachine gun's ammo had run out.

The Fae are careless of their underlings, capricious and cruel with any race that is not Fae and often with each other as well. They honor treaties to the letter but not in spirit or intent, and they twist the literal meaning of words better than any lawyer or politician. But while the Fae will betray anyone as soon as it becomes convenient or entertaining, they also hold grudges with a sociopathic tenacity if any being is foolish enough to trick or cross them.

I walked back to the buggane whose ankle I had crushed. It was shrinking back down to its natural form and had almost disappeared into the ground. I don't know if it'd had enough or if it had decided that it would be easier to move and attack me from below. I could barely see it at all, only had a sense of a moving shadow where the earth should be still, but I fired my Ruger into that writhing darkness until the movement stopped.

There were only two sounds left after that: Eric breathing raggedly and harshly, and the sound of ripping duct tape. Duct tape? Oh. The Fae woman had not been carrying any pouches or sacks. She must have duct taped a spare clip to the stock of the Thompson.

“Well that was very disappointing.” Her voice was light and reflective. “What
are
you?”

“I could ask you the same question.” I was walking toward her now; I didn't want to alarm or rush her while I picked up my compound bow and slung it over my shoulders. The first buggane I'd encountered had finally quieted, but it was still twitching where the pike had it pinned against the ground.

I meant what I said by the way. I knew she was some kind of forest nymph, but bored immortals will sleep with just about anything at least once, and the Fae are a family tree with many branches.

“You could,” she agreed sweetly. She had moved so that she was facing me now, and it was no accident that her spine was arched to make her breasts protrude prominently, that her jutting right nipple was clearly illumined in moonlight, that a hip was cocked to make the curve of one buttock visible. Her face was indeed beautiful, flawless and aglow with youth and eternal mystery. “But I asked you first. Would you like to trade information with me?”