Charming by Elliott James

a short spasm of a laugh. He seemed to be genuinely amused rather than making some kind of bitter, sarcastic statement. Then the amusement died out and he stared at me seriously. “If I didn’t,” and at this point he nodded slowly toward Sig, “she would leave me.”
    You know, there’s honesty, and then there’s too much information. We all sat there, not sure how to move forward after that last little bomb mot. Sig looked like she’d been sucker punched a second time. It was clear that she wanted to saysomething, but she wasn’t sure what, or even which one of us she wanted to say it to. Served her right. You play with fire, you get burned. You play with intimacy, you get awkward.
    Cahill cleared his throat. “You said you wanted to tell him two things,” he reminded Sig, indicating me with a jut of his chin. “What was the second?”
    “Oh.” Sig looked as if she was having second thoughts but went on anyhow. “We could use your help going after the rest of the vampire hive today.”
    If she’d known me half as well as she thought she did, she would have told me that part first.

9
THE FIRST RULE OF REAL ESTATE
    I hadn’t lived in Clayburg long, but even I knew that once you got to the streets numbered higher than fourteen, you were in a bad part of town. The address on Steve Ellison’s license was on Seventeenth Street.
    There were six of us traveling in the van I’d seen the night before, an exterminator’s van as it turned out. Which would have been a lot more comfortable if I hadn’t had an enhanced sense of smell. Cigarette smoke and pot stink clung to the cracking black plastic of the seats, mingling with the lingering odor of pesticides and fumigants and antiseptic cleaners. And beneath all of that, the faint scent of trace molecules left behind by bodies, human and inhuman, in varying degrees of decomposition. It made it hard to pretend that I was riding in the Mystery Machine with Scooby-Doo and the gang.
    The African American man the van belonged to turned out to be a guy named Chauncey Childers whose parents had obviously combined a love of alliteration with a hatred of small children. When we officially met at Dvornik’s studio, Chauncey had told me that everybody called him Choo Choo for shortor Choo for even shorter. He had skin the color of coffee and cream and was big-bellied and bony-assed, with lots of tiny braids coming out of his skull that were bound together by prayer beads. A long drooping mustache surrounded his goatee without ever quite touching it. Choo was somewhere in his mid-forties or early fifties, an inch or so shy of six feet, and he had a disproportionately long torso. When we were standing up, I was taller than he was, but sitting in the van he looked down at me.
    Choo really was a professional exterminator. It said so on the card he showed me. The card also advertised spiritual cleansings and negative energy removal and had a Web address. When I had asked him how he had gotten involved with this group, he clapped me on the shoulder and told me that he had seen some shit exterminating old houses that I would not believe. Then he’d smiled real big and brayed a loud, slightly nervous laugh, and said, “Oh, hell, I guess you would believe it.”
    I was sitting shotgun while Choo drove. Sig and Dvornik were in the two bolted-down bucket seats that made a gap-toothed smile of a second row. Neither Sig nor Dvornik had said more than a few words since we’d left my house, not to each other and certainly not to anybody else. It had made it a little awkward when I was forced to rely on them for introductions. When I asked Sig where Cahill had gone, she had tersely informed me that he had a job.
    At the back of the van, squatting on a large folded rubber tent amid a clutter of metal canisters, brightly colored cardboard boxes, canvas bags, and sheets of plastic, were the East European twins who had turned out to be younger, smaller versions of Dvornik. Topping out at