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a spell?
    Well, there’s something going on right in front of your face that you can’t see right now, and you’re not going to believe me when I point it out to you. Relax, I’m not going to provide a number where you can leave your credit card information, and you don’t have to join anything. The only reason I’m telling you at all is that at some point in the future, you might have a falling-out with the worldview you’re currently enamored of, and if that happens, what I’m about to tell you will help you make sense of things later.
The supernatural is real. Vampires? Real. Werewolves? Real. Zombies, Ankou, djinn, Boo Hags, banshees, ghouls, spriggans, windigos, vodyanoi, tulpas, and so on and so on, all real. Well, except for Orcs and Hobbits. Tolkien just made those up.
    I know it sounds ridiculous. How could magic really exist in a world with an Internet and forensic science and smartphones and satellites and such and still go undiscovered?
The answer is simple: it’s magic.
    The truth is that the world is under a spell called the Pax Arcana, a compulsion that makes people unable to see, believe, or even seriously consider any evidence of the supernatural that is not an immediate threat to their survival.
I know this because I come from a long line of dragon slayers, witch finders, and self-righteous asshats. I used to be one of the modern-day knights who patrol the borders between the world of man and the supernatural abyss that is its shadow. I wore non-reflective Kevlar instead of shining armor and carried a sawed-off shotgun as well as a sword; I didn’t light a candle against the dark, I wielded a flamethrower… right up until the day I discovered that I had been cursed by one of the monsters I used to hunt. My name is Charming by the way. John Charming.
    And I am not living happily ever after.

Chapter 1
A Blonde and a Vampire Walk into a Bar…
    Once upon a time, she smelled wrong. Well, no, that’s not exactly true. She smelled clean, like fresh snow and air after a lightning storm and something hard to identify, something like sex and butter pecan ice cream. Honestly, I think she was the best thing I’d ever smelled. I was inferring “wrongness” from the fact that she wasn’t entirely human.
    I later found out that her name was Sig.
    Sig stood there in the doorway of the bar with the wind behind her, and there was something both earthy and unearthly about her. Standing at least six feet tall in running shoes, she had shoulders as broad as a professional swimmer’s, sinewy arms, and well-rounded hips that were curvy and compact. All in all, she was as buxom, blonde, blue-eyed, and clear-skinned as any woman who had ever posed for a Swedish tourism ad.
    And I wanted her out of the bar, fast.
    You have to understand, Rigby’s is not the kind of place where goddesses were meant to walk among mortals. It is a small, modest establishment eking out a fragile existence at the tail end of Clayburg’s main street. The owner, David Suggs, had wanted a quaint pub, but instead of decorating the place with dartboards or Scottish coats of arms or ceramic mugs, he had decided to celebrate southwest Virginia culture and covered the walls with rusty old railroad equipment and farming tools.
    When I asked why a bar—excuse me, I mean pub —with a Celtic name didn’t have a Celtic atmosphere, Dave said that he had named Rigby’s after a Beatles song about lonely people needing a place to belong.
    “Names have power,” Dave had gone on to inform me, and I had listened gravely as if this were a revelation.
    Speaking of names, “John Charming” is not what it reads on my current driver’s license. In fact, about the only thing accurate on my current license is the part where it says that I’m black-haired and blue-eyed. I’m six foot one instead of six foot two and about seventy-five pounds lighter than the 250 pounds indicated on my identification. But I do kind of look the way the man pictured on my