Honeyed Words (19 page)

We headed outside and around to the back of the carport. My job was to hold stuff, mainly. I stood and stared at the huge sheet of steel she had supported by a block and tackle. There were two hoists back there, and it was clear that their original use was to pull out engines. Right now, she had the steel held upward by several lengths of chain wrapped around it, but it rested on the ground.

The steel was easily an inch thick, five feet wide and eight feet tall. I did the math in my head—roughly a ton. I wouldn’t want that falling on me. Crazy for her to be working like this alone. Too damn dangerous.

She spent the first hour cutting out several square pieces of steel from the greater piece. Not from the side or anything, but directly from the middle, like windows. I couldn’t really tell what she was going for. Had me curious, but she was keeping her vision to herself for now. All I know is, bracing a large sheet of steel while someone else cuts it with a torch is pretty tiring.

After we finished, we rolled the engine hoist into the yard, and then brought in the fallen warrior with the missing arm.

Anezka walked to one of the lockers in the back and pulled the arm out of a large laundry bag. Odd place to store an arm, but it wasn’t my smithy.

“What happened to the arm?” I asked.

“Raccoons, bad weld, gravity…” She shrugged.

Well, that was definitive. She was odd, this Anezka.

It didn’t take too long to weld it into place. She was meticulous and very precise. I paid close attention to her work, watching her maneuver the tip of the flame to get the most precise cuts and heat the metal for a good, even weld. Welding was as much art as science, and she had a steady hand and a very good eye.

By the time we had the warrior back under the baleful eye of the dragon, it was nearly eleven.

“Lunch?” she asked, taking her gloves off and dropping them on a worktable next to her warrior welding mask.

“Sure,” I said, setting my plain, unadorned welding mask on the table next to hers. “I could definitely eat.”

“Burgers, sushi, or breakfast?” she asked, pulling the apron over her head and throwing the neck loop over the nearest mannequin. I did the same with mine, onto a second mannequin, and rubbed my head with both hands. My scalp was itching and my legs were twinging. Magic in the area?

“Burgers are good,” I said, looking around.

“You okay?” she asked, watching me with a funny look.

I shrugged. “Got a chill.”

She laughed.

I caught her glancing behind me to the left, back near the old forge with the bellows. No idea what she was seeing, but it was kind of creepy. I held my hands up and twisted back and forth a couple of times, stretching out my back and glancing behind me. I didn’t see anything, but something had caught her attention.

“Want I should drive?” I asked.

“You’ll have to,” she said, clapping me on the shoulder. “I don’t have a license.”

Odd again. How’d she get groceries, supplies?

Lunch was going to be interesting. I had about a million questions.

“Can I use your bathroom?” I asked.

“Sure,” she said, escorting me to the house, through the carport. “Inside on the left, just down the hall.”

The house was spare: old seventies-style kitchen, mustard yellow appliances, and hideous green shag in the living room.

I found the bathroom easily enough, but when I shut off the water from washing my hands, I could hear her arguing with someone. I craned my head at the window but couldn’t quite see to the smithy.

There was no car in the drive, and no one else had parked out on the street. I let the screen door shut a little hard so she knew I was coming and walked across the carport to the smithy.

She sat on the worktable, swinging her legs, a satchel in her lap.

There was no one else in the smithy.

“I thought I heard you talking to someone,” I said, looking around.

She looked at me quizzically. “I do that sometimes,” she said, hopping off the table and walking toward my car. I shuffled around the row of anvils to catch up to her.

“You argue with yourself?”

“It’s a long story. Let’s get some grub.”

I unlocked the car with the fob and hustled around to the driver’s side. She was already in and buckled by the time I got the driver’s-side door opened.

“Kelly makes the best burgers in Leavenworth,” she said, as if nothing strange was happening. “Will be good to see her; I don’t get into town much.”

“Good to know,” I said, adjusting the mirrors.

I gasped. Skella was there, her face behind mine, like she was in the backseat. She held one finger in front of her lips and winked.

“You okay?” Anezka asked.

“Fine,” I said, jamming the key into the ignition. “Just a cautious driver.”

I glared at Skella who mouthed
sorry
and then held up a piece of slate. There were words written there, awkwardly and with misshapen letters. Hard to write backward.

“
Tonight, midnight,” it said; then she was gone.

I pulled out into the road, making a U-turn back toward Leavenworth.

Damn, my life was strange. Okay, I’d asked for a meet, but jebus, how’d she find me in my freaking car mirror? Had she been in the Taurus? Rolph said he thought they could only use mirrors they’d seen before. Maybe it wasn’t the mirror. Maybe it was whom they wanted to see.

Twenty-six

We parked in a gravel lot behind a strip of knickknack stores. The crowds were light, it being Monday, I guessed. The restaurant was down a flight of stairs to the basement. The girl behind the pie case who took our orders was young and cheerful. I was surprised there was no one else in the place.

We ordered monster burgers, curly fries, and sodas. Everything was huge, geared for the ever-expanding tourist. I ate half my burger, but Anezka plowed through hers like she hadn’t eaten in a month.

While she ate, I looked around the place. Exposed beams were painted in rainbow colors and each one was covered in dollar bills. Apparently someone wrote a compliment on a bill and left it for a tip decades ago, and the tourists have kept up the tradition. Very oddly sweet in a capitalist-driven sort of way.

I picked at my fries, and Anezka ordered bread pudding. It was huge. Watching her eat all that food made me a little queasy.

The television on the wall was showing a golf tournament with the sound turned off. I was vegging while she wolfed her food down, trying not to look at her.

She belched loudly and licked the remaining icing off her fork. “You know,” she said, dragging her tongue along the tines of the fork, “you don’t look like a dragon slayer.”

The runes on my scalp flared to life, and I dove to one side as she lunged across the table, stabbing at me with the fork. The thunk of the metal striking the bench seat rang loudly as I rolled away.

What the hell? I scrambled out from under the table on all fours, rolling to my feet as Anezka fell into the bench seat I’d just vacated. I looked around for a weapon of some sort as I backed away. There were no other customers, and the girl who ran the counter was nowhere in sight.

I dodged back along the middle row of booths and around to the aisle close to the bathrooms. There was only one way out, up the narrow stairs, and I didn’t see anything I could use as a weapon.

Anezka sprang up from the booth, only it wasn’t Anezka. Her face peeled back, shredded and tattered, as the mouth opened like a hinged garbage can, lined with teeth.

“What the hell are you?” I shouted, dancing to the side as the creature shook like a dog shedding water. The flesh and clothing that had been Anezka sloughed off, splattering the surrounding tables and chairs with wet, oozing shards.

I darted toward the stairs, and the monster lunged that way. It stood about four feet tall, covered in fine red scales. The skin of its face was stretched tight over its skull, giving it the creepy look of a desiccated corpse. The ears were little nubs on either side of its face and the nose was two slits over the cavernous mouth.

It was a scaled eating machine, all gristle and bone. It swiped a taloned claw forward—the blackened claws sliced through a wooden beam easily a foot thick.

“You are too soft to slay one of the great ones,” it said. Flames flared across its scalp, dying out in the next second.

“Friend of yours?” I asked, sliding across a table and launching a bottle of ketchup at the freak show.

It caught the bottle in its gaping maw, cackling gleefully. I rolled across the next bench and grabbed two more bottles of ketchup as the sound of grinding glass echoed through the place.

“It’s been so long since I’ve eaten this well,” the critter said, belching again. “I wonder what you’ll taste like?”

More flames danced along its arms and legs. As I watched, it seemed to grow.

Fire creature; eats a lot. Fuel makes fires bigger … crap!

I needed something to put out fires. There was a fire extinguisher on the stairway coming down, and probably one in the kitchen, but I didn’t want to get cut off back there. I’d likely find a knife, but with those scales and talons, I didn’t want to risk it.

Food was the key for the moment. Not that I needed it getting any bigger, but I also didn’t want to get tagged. “Hey, ugly … catch.” I tossed the second bottle of ketchup, and it jumped, snatching the bottle from the air.

I ran for the stairs, kicking a display of chips behind me and tossing the third bottle of ketchup back by the soda fountain.

It didn’t take the bait but leapt over one table and across a counter, then swung around a support post, flying straight at me. I fell back onto the table, which groaned and sagged under my weight.

No table dancing here.

I twisted around. The lump in my back proved to be the salt and pepper shakers, small glass jobbies, solid and heavy. I threw those as hard as I could at the eating machine and crawled over the bench. It ate both in one gulp as it flew across the room at me, landing on taloned feet and hands, smashing the table I’d just broken to the ground.

I scampered to the staircase, stopping to grab the fire extinguisher from the wall; then I turned and backed slowly up the stairs. The beastie was coughing and retching at the bottom of the stairs, hacking up gouts of flame and something that could’ve been blood, but was likely ketchup.

“Hope you like cold,” I said, pulling the pin from the extinguisher and squeezing the trigger.

Foam shot out of the nozzle, spraying the bottom of the stairs before I got my aim down. I worked the spray over the damn thing as it sputtered and flamed.

It shrieked, dancing backward, falling over the chip rack. I followed it down a few steps, keeping the spray on it until the extinguisher ran dry.

It flopped around on the floor, its limbs flailing about, smashing the glass pie case and splintering a long wooden bench, but finally quit moving. I stepped onto the bottom landing and swung the extinguisher into the creature’s skull with all my strength, smashing it with a wet crunch.

It kicked once, then stopped moving.

I stumbled backward, sitting down on the stairs, where I watched its one taloned foot, ready to fly up the stairs if it moved. I doubted that it was getting up again, not with the way I’d just smashed its skull like that, but hell, I hadn’t expected Anezka to turn into a damn … “Fire goblin?” I asked the air.

“Kobold,” a voice said behind me. I whirled; Anezka stood at the top of the stairs. She had a motorcycle helmet in her hand and a long steel pry bar in the other. “I see you managed okay.”

“What the hell is going on?” I yelled, climbing to my feet and storming up the stairs. “Is this some kind of fucking game with you?”

She held the helmet and pry bar up between us in a purely defensive stance. “Sorry about that.”

Sorry? I blinked. “Sorry, like gee, didn’t mean to borrow your best shoes, or gee, sorry I spilled my beer on your rug. Are you fucking insane?”

Laughter, sweet and rich, was not what I expected. Crazy, maniacal ranting, high-pitched tittering before an irrational soliloquy about some universal wrong or other, but not the warm, welcoming noise that rolled up from her.

“I apologize for his behavior,” she said, smiling. “I hope you can find it in your heart to forgive me. But I needed to be sure—test your mettle. I don’t have time for brittle iron or delicate flowers.”

Delicate flowers? Was she drunk? “Fuck that,” I growled, stepping toward her.

She backed up to the doorway, and I noticed the sign had been turned around to
CLOSED
.

“You okay up there, Anezka?” the serving girl called from downstairs.

“Yeah, Kelly. We’re good.”

I gaped at her. This was beyond weird. “I’ll pay for the damages,” she called down.

“Gonna be a helluva mess to clean up,” the girl said, coming around to the bottom of the stairs. She was drying her hands on a rag. “This your kobold?”

“Yeah,” she said. “Sorry about that.”