The Foul Mouth and the Cat Killing Coyotes (The King Henry Tapes) (20 page)

“
What the bitch did we just do?” T-Bone gasped.

Let’s start this one with another question:  ever run for your life?  Guessing not.  First World . . . it’s probably possible for a person to get through life without ever
running
a single time.  Sad truth but we’ve forgotten the caveman . . . where we’re worried about the saber-toothed cat gnawing on our young.  Forgotten crawling up into the tree, screeching our furry little heads off and throwing our own crap at the velociraptor.

I think that’s the key right there.  Ask yourself again:  could you imagine wanting to live so badly that you’d throw your own crap at a person?
  That you would swipe your pants down a few inches, push one out in the middle of public, grab on with a hand and let fly?

People nowadays don’t even want to live badly enough that they’d buckle a stupid ass seatbelt.

Running hand-in-hand with Miranda and Isabel?  My ass wanted to live.  I talked a big game about Samson screwing with us . . . but put into a situation where those howls went off a second time . . . my ass wanted to live and it wanted the rest of me to live as well.

If throwing crap would have helped, I would’ve done it.

Running.  I blocked the rest out.  The screams, the howls started up.  Eyes forward, peering into the dark night.  Full moon or near enough, some light, but not a whole lot.

Pause
. . . imagine it, close your eyes.

Rushing forward into a place where you can barely see.  Feet hitting things you can’t see.  Dodging trees and bushes seeming to jump from nowhere.  Terrifying, make y
our heart beat like it don’t got but a few beats left.  Make those last few beats fucking count.

I felt so little.  My face was cold, steam passing over my shoulder as I burst forward step by step.  Wasn’t smoking a fake cigarette now, I was a rolling locomotive, chugging along, breakneck speed.  Funny how you don’t think about the origins of
breakneck
until it’s your neck, ain’t it?

Face, chest, legs, all covered up in my geomancer browns.  Nice and comfy.  Didn’t feel but a little and that little was all hand.  My hands grabbing to Miranda’s wrist and Isabel’s palm.  Isabel looked like a joke, red and whit
e, frizzy hair wildly dancing side to side.  Least she kept up thought.  Miranda ran with a hand on her glasses, her pure white colors even worse, shining in the moonlight.  Her body wasn’t made for running; that butt and chest cushioning gyrated all over the place, her legs pumping but her steps short.

“Come on,” I growled again, tugging harder at her wrist.

“I . . . can’t . . . my . . . lungs . . .”

“You want to die like Valentine?” I asked.

Cruel, King Henry, cruel.

But it
sped her up.

We kept running
, not stopping until almost ten minutes of it.  All of us were beat.  We just crumbled down on the leaf-covered ground.  The
ground
. . . I pushed leaves out of the way.

WAIT.

“Good thing, cuz we ain’t got more left in the tank,” I muttered.

Talking didn’t matter since it wasn’t any louder than our breathing.  Miranda sounded like a bagpipe. 
Too bad Jethro Smith already hit her up with a nickname . . . that would have been a good one for her . . .
Bagpipes
.  Isabel, strangely, looked the best . . . well, condition-wise.  Have I mentioned her ears?  Yeah . . . sticking out from her head . . . just . . .
ugly
.

“You discharge?” I asked, suspicious.

She looked guilty and that was enough of an answer.

“Next time,” I told her, raising my fist, “in your hand, punch the
cocksuckers.”

Isabel smiled.  Well, it
made her look happy at least.  “It doesn’t work that way with corpusmancers,” she said.  You know, another strange thing about Isabel . . . ugly yes, which you’re probably tired of hearing about, but she did have a lovely voice, soft and sultry with a South American accent.

“How does it work?” I asked.

She shrugged.  “Makes you less tired.  Makes you able to hold something you think you’re going to drop.”

“Huh
. . . what about you?” I asked Miranda.

She
still breathed heavy.  It was distracting.  “I haven’t ever discharged.”

“You’re shitting me?”

“No . . . never.”

“Ever done it on purpose?”

“You’ve had the same classes I have.”

“Right
. . .”

In front of me
, the word WAIT changed into STOP TRYING SO HARD.

I drew a question mark by it.

YOU ARE OF THE EARTH.

Isabel glanced over my shoulder to see what I was doing.  “What does that mean?”

“Uh . . .”

Miranda joined her.  “
You are of the Earth
. . . are you trying to improve your morale, King Henry?  You are so
big
and
strong
, yes you are!”

I’d have told her off but the dirt moving again shut her up as good as I’ve ever seen.

I WARNED YOU ABOUT AIR.

“
What the freak is that?!?!
” Miranda screeched.

THEY HEARD HER.  RUN.

[CLICK]

“This time . . . don’t . . . freak . . . out . . . and . . . don’t . . . be . . . so damned loud . . .” I gasped.  Even I could barely talk after the last running burst away from our hiding spot.

Isabel only nodded but Miranda whispered something I couldn’t hear.  I figured I knew the question so I just answered.  “A fairy, it’s a fairy.  Yes, there are apparently fairies.  It’s helping us get away for some reason and I ain’t knocking the help,
got it?”

“Fairy
. . . can be dangerous,” she explained.

Right
. . . she’s old family like Welf, even if they didn’t get along, some feud or something.  “Oh?”

“It’s probably a small anima sprite enjoying the game of running from the wolves,” she decided the whole thing for herself.

Small?
  That anima I’d felt hadn’t been small.  That anima had been . . . well, you heard the dreams, what do you think it felt like? 
God
is a good word for it.  You sure as hell could have worshiped him and not felt out of place.  “If you say so, but we haven’t been caught yet, and it warned me about the attack, so let’s listen to the crazy words in the dirt, all right?”

“So it’
s a geomancer fairy?” Isabel asked, frowning.

“Yes,” Miranda confirmed,
more know-it-all the more air she got in her lungs.

“Are there corpusmancer fairies?”

“Yes, they usually form in places where there are strenuous competitions or a lot of people together, like stadiums.  They’re far rarer than the geo-types.  Fairies work backwards from mancers.”

Forget
Bagpipes
, maybe Smith should have named her
Exposition
.

“Enough talking,” I growled. 
Fairy
, I thought,
stupid name
.

Miranda scowled at me.  Out of the three of us she was the easiest to make out in the moonlight.  Reddish hair, glasses glinting, and that white coat.

“You should roll in the dirt,” I told her.

“
Excuse me?
”

“Dirty up your coat.” I pointed to her. “Mud would be better
. . . like
Predator
, but all we got is dirt.”

Miranda sure could glare.  For once the ginger helped her work the devil-possessed expression.  “You’re out of your mind.”

“You
are
easy to see,” Isabel seemed to realize.

Miranda changed the subject.  “What was that about
‘
dying like Valentine’
?  That was horrible.  You said she’s fine and you wanted to stay in camp; now, you’re saying she’s not fine and you’re running into the woods.”

“Keep your voice down
. . .” I whispered, glancing left and right but seeing nothing but vague trees, brush, and a whole lot of darkness, “ . . . or I leave you this time when we need to run.”

Pouting, she sat in the dirt, making it very clear she was no longer talking to me.  Fourte
en-year-old-me, how did you survive seven years with all those teenage girls?

I sat down next to her, Isabel joining us on the other side of me.  If the camping spot had been the ass end of nowhere then I don’t think the human race has a term for where I wa
s at.  West:  trees.  East:  trees.  North:  trees.  South:  trees.  Might as well have been a desert island, I couldn’t have felt lonelier.

Out of place
. . . that’s the problem.

Put me in an urban setting with a gang hunting after my pugnacious ass following a beatdown on one of their members?  I got that down.  Done it before actually.  Seventh grade.  Two of them found me at the same time
as I hid in an alley.

One had a knife and I knew I had to take him out first no matter how many punches the other landed.  Kids with knives
. . . those little bastards are psychotic.  I trust kids with gun obsessions more than I trust the knife lovers.  That’s why I pushed the knife out of the way and tackled him to the ground, wailed on him while his friend wailed on me.

By the time Knife Kid
was knocked out my back and sides were bruised and I’d earned myself a few days peeing pink.  Urban . . . I can handle urban predators.  But forest . . . wolves?  Not my thing at all . . .

“I wonder what’s happening out there,” Miranda eventually said . . . at least she kept her voice down.

The screaming and yelling and even the howls had stopped.

Trees, trees, and quiet trees.

“Your
parents are mancers, didn’t they warn you?” I asked.

Miranda gave a snort that shook her glasses.  “Tradition is taken very seriously here.  You aren’t supposed to let the Singles in on it, even if it’s your child.  So no, my not knowing doesn’t disqualify this being some test.”

“Would have been nice to know we’re being hunted by werewolves . . .” I deadpanned.

“It’s very possible
for them to manage something like this,” Miranda thought, “the teachers have access to artifacts, ESLED answers to the Lady . . . they could put on a reasonable
attack
to see our reactions as a final test before they begin really teaching us Elementalism next month.”

“You think that’s it?”

Her arms crossed to hug her stomach.  “I hope that’s it.”

The ground changed.  I’d been keeping an eye on it.  WALK THIS WAY.  There was an arrow too.  “We got orders, gals.”

[CLICK]

We walked for at least a couple hours.  Occasionally I’d make out an arrow in the dirt and we’d change direction.  Generally we headed parallel to the road, which I guess would be south.  Eventually, tired and scared or not, we got bored, and bored teenagers revert to type:  we started talking like we were just strolling through the countryside.

“Why is it you can commune with fairies and convince the class to vote for Pocket, but you can’t make friends or just follow the teachers
’ instructions for a good grade?” Miranda asked, like I had purposely set up this situation in an attempt to turn the universe inside-out.

I didn’t even really have to think about the answer.  “I don’t
want
to make friends or follow the teachers.  I do what I want, that’s my glorious secret.”

Isabel giggled.

Girl’s wrong I tell you, just wrong.  Why did the ugly one have to have a psycho crush on me?  Can’t say I knew how to handle it either.  Sally and I had been a thing before the Asylum, we’d done some firsts and seconds and thirds with each other, but there had been no
crushing
.

I wasn’t exactly the type to crush on a girl either.  Not much impressed me back then.  You heard what Ceinwyn had to pull just to get me interested in the Mancy.  Love and lust
were a lot the same.  Having a crush?  Girl having a crush on me?  Having a best friend?  New experiences all around.

Great friend you are, man,
you left Pocket back there to get ate
.

Hey,
I argued with myself,
I didn’t have time
.

You ran like a little bitch.  What happened to throwing down?  The Mancy cut your balls off?

“I don’t understand not wanting to do well at school,” Miranda concluded.

“I’m sure you’re good at everything,” I said.

“What’s
that
mean?”

Isabel defended me, “He means you aren’t good at everything,
don’t you have sarcasm where you come from?”