Free Charming by Elliott James

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 ahouse 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.
    It was almost a relief when the police came visiting the next morning.

8
BEDEVILED EGGS
    T here were two men arrayed behind Sig when I opened the front door. One of them was a hamster-cheeked chunky guy with freckles and an unruly patch of brown hair. He smelled like mint toothpaste and cheap deodorant and dried semen, and his sweat contained a long history of heavy meat meals. He was in his late thirties or early forties, and you could tell the guy still had some muscle beneath the fat. There was nothing likable about him on the surface—his already small eyes were narrowed and watchful, and the words “Don’t Fuck with Me” were tattooed all over him in body language, but there was nothing immediately threatening in his manner either. There was a bulge beneath his jacket at the right hip that was almost certainly a holstered gun, and probably a large one at that, and he was dressed respectably enough in the kind of modest suits that working-class cops wear, a plain wedding ring on his left hand. I decided that he was the cop I’d seen in the alley.
    The other man was taller than me by about four inches and shaped like an inverted bowling pin. His head, shoulders, and chest were all massive, developed to the point where his thickhips and legs looked skinny by comparison. He was in his late fifties or early sixties, the dome of his head shining out as if it were a mountain peak and his white hair the snow melting off it. I guess that would mean that the patchy white beard hanging off the crag of his chin was like frost or something. Similes aside, what was really cold about him was his eyes. They were pale blue, openly hostile, and infinitely weary. It was a strange combination. I hated him on sight.
    And if he didn’t have at least two weapons hidden under his shapeless gray trench coat, I was an Ankou’s uncle. He smelled like a lot of things… some kind of muscle liniment, Nicorette, beef, cabbage… but the dominant smells were gun oil and wolfsbane and rage.
    Unless there were other unaccounted-for people working with Sig, this was the psychic who had led her to the bar. He sure as hell wasn’t a cop.
    “How’s it going, Sunshine?” Sig asked me cheerfully. “You look like hell.”
    It was nine in the morning, and she was wearing the same clothes she’d had on the night before. I was wearing an Amazing Spider-Man T-shirt and a pair of jeans I’d hurriedly pulled on over my boxers. “Bad dreams,” I mumbled.
    “You should have just gone without sleep like me,” she informed me unsympathetically, then nodded at