The Foul Mouth and the Fanged Lady (28 page)

She couldn’t meet my eyes when she offered,
but she did ask, “You sure you don’t want to come with me this
time?”

It meant a lot. To have another out. But by
then . . . there’s no way I was actually getting out. After Mom,
after Ceinwyn, after the Asylum . . . I was a mancer through and
through—and I had to protect my own. “No, Susan. I’m going back to
school. It’s the only way.”

She gave me a last smile. “If you ever
change your mind, then come find me. Seattle, remember that.”

“Seattle, sure. Rainy ass Seattle. If you’re
not mad yet, you will be,” I told her, backing up to let her close
the door.

With a final wave, she pulled out and drove
away, gone as quickly as she appeared.

I haven’t seen or heard of her since . . .
and I’ve looked . . . she’s disappeared . . .

[CLICK]

Ceinwyn waited for me like she promised. “So
soon?” she asked with a questioning smile as I stepped into the car
and sat down.

“I don’t like funerals apparently.”

“No one does,” she told me. “Not even
necromancers.”

“Wouldn’t put it past them,” I mumbled,
staring out the window.

“Who was the familiar looking young lady you
talked to?” she finally asked after the proscribed time she figured
I needed for her to wait.

“My sister.”

“Interesting.”

“I asked her if mysterious things were
happening around her.”

“Were they?”

“She said no.”

“That’s good.”

“Yeah, it is,” I agreed.

“We have an extra day off, you know, if you
want to go somewhere else to relax.” Coming from Ceinwyn Dale, the
idea of taking a day off is a miracle. She barely saw her
house—relaxing . . . vacations . . . those were things for other
people. “Have you ever been to the Pacific Ocean?”

“Back to the Asylum,” I told her. “I might
not beat Val or Welf or Miranda this year but I think I have a shot
at top five with the classes we’re taking. Be nice to see the look
on Asa’s face when I pass her.”

The car started with a purr of its hybrid
engine. “You’ve not only grown up, King Henry, you’ve become a good
student. What a world . . .”

“Mom would want me to,” I said, as if that
explained it. Maybe it did. Maybe in the end, King Henry Price just
needed someone to save. Mom was gone, but others like her still
remained.

“Home sweet home,” I mumbled as I unlocked
the front door to my shop with a small burst of anima. One of the
perks about being a geomancer is not needing keys. Which comes in
handy during those situations where you’ve been kidnapped by a vamp
who don’t care if you ever find your way back. I guess I should
have been glad she even bothered to lock the door.

The vampire in question followed behind me,
taking a second glance around my shop. Unlike the first time, she
was armed with the pair of knives that had been stashed away in her
travelling bag. Also unlike the first time, my shop wasn’t
immaculately cleaned. Instead, it looked like some kind of derby
had taken place, which I suppose ain’t so bad of a metaphor for the
fight Annie B and I had. Glass, ceramic, and my shelves took most
of the pain. The comic rack was fine, so was my little LED 3D
television I’d bought to watch my make up television. Least we’d
broken the stuff I hated.

“Is that your motorcycle?” Annie B asked,
closing the door. Back at the curb, a year-old modern-looking bike
sat forlorn, the only transportation in the parking lot during that
hour. Sorry to ruin my image, but it’s not a chopper.

I pulled out a broom from under my checkout
counter. It was a collapsible model. When I bought it, I’d been
thinking about the occasional accident, not a whole store of them.
“Yeah.”

“Why?”

“Why a bike?” I asked, dumping my first load
of glass in my trashcan. Five-hundred dollars down the drain.

“Why an electric?”

I let out a sigh; put the broom against a
display. Guess the mess could wait until after I survived the
night. If I
did
survive. I had other shit to do, lots of
shit, Artificer shit, mancer shit, Annie B’s questions weren’t even
near the most important and cleaning ranked below
them
.

“Will you believe it’s for the planet?”

She laughed. Annie B had a nice laugh,
vampire or not. It was dark and deep, kind of dirty. Just like the
rest of her, it tempted you . . . to keep talking, keep making her
laugh. “Will you believe not a single part of me wants to eat you,
King Henry?”

I studied her face, still saw the beast
lurking, waiting. “Nope, see it in your eyes. You won’t . . . but
you want to.”

Her tongue touched her lip like it
continually had when she’d been really hungry. “Then how about you
tell me the real reason for the electric?”

“It’s embarrassing . . .”

She squinted at me. “I’m not sure how car
choice relates to embarrassment unless it has something to do with
sexual compensation and very big trucks.”

“Goes like this,” I reluctantly explained,
“I had a girlfriend at the Asylum who was on again and off again.
Loved the shit out of her. Humped the shit out of her too. For
awhile at least. One moment she’d be all over me, the next moment
she was standoffish. Confused me pretty bad. Scared me pretty bad
too when she’d get that look like she was going to smash me across
the room.”

Annie B kept up the squint, it was kind of
cute. That’s different . . . Annie B did sexy extremely well, but
cute . . . cute’s new. Didn’t think she had it in her. “And this
relates . . .”

Yup, about as embarrassing to speak about as
I’d expected. “She’s a Firestarter. So I don’t trust flammable
vehicles.”

Now that got her to laugh again. Women are
all on the same side as long as they don’t actually know one
another. They get to know one another . . . then it gets even
worse.

[CLICK]

What does an Artificer do?

Let’s go back to one of my very first
sessions. It might have been the very first one actually, I can’t
remember, but I do remember using the example.

So it’s thousands of years ago and there are
these two groups of Irish or British warriors, I think I called
them fucktards the first time around, and these warriors are waving
their asses and peckers at each other, which is more cruel than
terrifying. Like a guy wants to see another guy’s dick hanging
between his ass cheeks just before he’s about to die in a gruesome
battle and have that be his last mental image. That’s just rude.
Why not bring out the tribe’s most beautiful woman and get her
naked and show her off against the other tribe’s naked woman?

Look at me, King Henry the Diplomat.

Only one guy ain’t in on pecker waving, he’s
standing silent, concentrating so hard he might be constipated and
then, after five minutes, a bolt of lightning flies down from the
heavens and smashes into the other side, killing a couple guys and
running the rest of them off. We’ll call the guy Merlin. As a
normal mancer with preparation and a proper use of theatrics and
bluffing about having a second bolt of lightning, he keeps his
soldiers alive.

Or maybe it was just the pecker waving.

But let’s change the situation, maybe in
this situation Merlin shoots down his lightning and misses and
while a couple guys get so scared they crap themselves, all the
peckerwavers still man it up and charge each other and what you got
is a lot of dead people while Merlin is standing around for five
more minutes pooling anima for another lightning bolt.

Surviving this, Merlin goes to his cute
friend Nimue who happens to be an Artificer and Nimue whips Merlin
up a nice staff with a snazzy crystal on top that can shoot a
preloaded set of lightning bolts. Next time, Merlin’s got his staff
and by thinking even further ahead he’s got more than one lightning
bolt right off the bat.

This is the easiest example of artificing.
The control and storage of anima for specific pre-set tasks. The
bigger the task, the more tasks, the more types of anima, the more
complicated it all gets. Trust me, it can get complicated in a
hurry.

The Shaky Stick?

Up to that point in my life and a long time
beyond it . . . I’d never imagined something as complicated as
controlling earthquakes. I’d pooled an hour to flip a car. Okay,
maybe it had been overkill and I let most my anima run loose, but
an earthquake . . . what kind of power and complication and mastery
of anima manipulation did it take to make something so big? And the
special anima it had . . .
how’s it doing it
?

I was a long time from finding out.

[CLICK]

I left Annie B in the storeroom, watching a
set of old
Walking Dead Season 3
Blu’s while I got down to
work. I had to be fast. She wouldn’t just sit around playing with
her knives forever. Sooner or later, done or not, she’d drag me out
of my shop. I
had
to be done if I wanted the night to go my
way, not just her way.

My way had both of us living, the Shaky
Stick under control, and Annie B leaving Fresno after handing me a
big check. If I didn’t finish these bits of artificing . . .

Without one: Annie B died. Without the
other: The Shaky Stick stayed under the wrong management.

Got to finish fast, King Henry.

A snap of anima I’d pooled returned my
worktable back to level, the pieces I’d manipulated to trap Annie B
slowly sliding downward like some metal mudslide looking to wipe
out Malibu. I walked by it, ran my hand over it, felt the cold
metal. There was a single seam in one spot that had held her left
thigh . . . but the rest . . .

“Good enough,” I said aloud.

Underneath the table I pulled out a drawer,
took out a piece of paper and a pencil. Setting them on the table
for later scrap-work of anima conversion formulas, I went over to
my wall of vials. There were thirteen rows of holes. Most were
empty. Pulling my electro-anima vial out of my coat pocket, I slid
it in its row . . . all lonesome.

My eyes went down the line, type by
type.

“Just enough.”

I pulled out a pair of cryo-vials and a pair
of geo-vials.

Yeah, I’m not going to be telling you how I
ever
exactly
make something, like twenty-two-year-old me
would say, the cocksuckers at the Guild of Artificers might be
listening in to these things. Better to be careful with my designs,
even the very oldest ones. Just know it was a lot more work than
you’d guess.

I’ll let you in on one modification I made
and that’s to my static ring: I changed the trigger from an anima
pulse to a pressure switch. I had a feeling it was going to be
another night for big anima pools.

The others? They are just going to have to
be surprises.

But it was going to work.

It had to work.

[CLICK]

Apparently, vampires have a thing for big
walls. Unlike the one in San Francisco, this one’s in Fresno, so
it’s made out of those ugly gray concrete bricks construction
companies use for tract-homes because they’re cheap and easy to
make, which means more money for developers and more depression for
the homeowner. Only Annie B and I weren’t in a tract-home area of
town, which is surprising, about 99% of Fresno has been nasty
live-in-your-box tract-homes since the housing boom-then-bust a
decade back. Miles and miles of tract-homes, painted the same three
different shades of tan, with the same doors and the same roofs and
a whole five different models over and over, all engulfed by the
Fog.

How could anyone hate the place?

Annie B stopped the car, which she’d rented
at the airport. The first one being flipped over in Los Banos but
still rented out in her name, the rental guy had been just a little
bit befuddled over why she needed another one, but money moved him
towards enlightenment with the speed of most televangelists. Annie
B not having a psycho pyromancer ex-girlfriend, it had a normal gas
engine.

“Okay, game plan time,” she told me, giving
me a significant glare that said shut-up-and-listen.

My usual self, I ignored it and gave her
trouble. “Yeah, I know. Sneak in, tell you what I feel, we find it,
get out, or you die and I get ate, you’ve told me enough times
already. I get it. I planned some backup plans. It’s all good.” My
hand motioned outside the car. “Sun’s coming up and the Fog don’t
have forever—let’s get this over with.”

Annie B listened calmly through the whole
thing. She even nodded along. But when I finished, she right up
punched me in my chest with a jab hard enough to slam me into the
door. “Shut up and listen,” she ordered.

“Are we never going to stop with the beating
on each other?” I asked, rubbing my chest and wincing with every
motion. She’d hit me right where the muscle was smallest over the
bone and damn did it hurt. “I gave in and gave you I’m-going-to-die
sex, you can’t keep punching me after that.”

Yup, we did. I fucked the evil blood
creature. Ain’t I a softie. More on this later.

She only glared. “Sex isn’t enough, maybe
after we fall in love and get married and have a family and all is
right with the world I’ll stop hitting you though.”

“That means never, right?”

She punched the other side.

“Damn it, lady,” I groaned.

“
Quit talking
,” she hissed with a
dangerous glint in her eyes, velvet gone predator. When I’d been
silent for more than ten seconds—besides my chest rubbing and
wincing—she continued, “We can’t be caught. You understand, yes?
And when I ask you a question over the next five minutes, might I
remind you that I’m only looking for a nod, not your usual
crap.”

I nodded. The things I put up with to get my
hands on thousand-year-old artifacts. Taking beatings, working two
artifacts even though I’m exhausted, having sex with gone-loopy
vampires. Awful I tell you, completely awful.