The Foul Mouth and the Fanged Lady (29 page)

“Vampires have very good hearing, good
enough that they can hear a heartbeat from down a hallway.
Understand?”

I nodded carefully.

“Once we get over that wall, you aren’t
going to be able to talk or they’ll know a stranger is in the area
immediately, understand?” she asked, with one of those
mother-nodding-at-child-to-get-a-similar-reaction nods. She had
such a beautifully long neck that it took her a much longer time
between movements than it did my short stumpy ass. Her neck choker
flashed at me in the gray.

B
.

B
.

B
.

I never had asked her what it stood for
after we got over the Anne Boleyn bullshit she peddled. Getting her
real name before the sex probably would have been a good idea.

I nodded again.

She gave me a smile along with an expression
somewhere between her
I-want-to-wear-you
face and her
so-you-aren’t-a-moron
face. “You’ll be limited to hand
signals. Pointing will work best and try to keep your middle
fingers under control. But, most of all: I want you to know that
while we’re somewhat cooperative at the moment, if it’s your foul
mouth that happens to get us caught among the many likely possible
accidents and mistakes that can get us caught, I will try to kill
you before they manage to take me down.”

I believed her. Not going to do what she
wanted, but I did believe her.

I raised my hand more warily than I ever had
at the Asylum with my teachers. “So . . . this,” I motioned at the
gated community for wealthy, stuck up, white people that our car
sat across the street from, “is really the Fresno Vampire
Embassy?”

Annie B glanced farther down the street, her
eyes trying to pierce the gray fog and make out the huge gate that
announced the name of the community. “Not quite. The Fresno Embassy
is inside the place, but the houses are rented out to vampires
staying in town. Fresno is a very popular hunting spot during the
winter, it gets a lot of traffic and it was decided years ago that
we should go this route instead of buying a hotel or apartment
complex out. We require a certain amount of privacy . . . as I’m
sure you understand . . .”

I got conflicted between a pair of
absurdities. In the end, I let my comment about someone actually
finding Fresno popular or worth travelling to stay inside my head
and went with, “Wait . . . you’re telling me there’s
actually
a whole vampire gated community in the middle of
the suburbs? Wasn’t that a shitty TV show a few years back?”

“I wouldn’t know, I’m a busy person—but
you’re the one who made me watch stupid zombies for three hours
while you played with your toys, so I suppose you’d be the expert,
wouldn’t you?”

She got out of the car before I could get a
rebuttal in, especially a rebuttal with a question mark at the end.
Guess it’s time to get stuff done.

Up and over the wall proved easy. I could
have even burned my pool of anima and made us a ladder of stone if
I’d wanted, but I needed the anima for later. I’d been pooling for
the customary five minutes by the time my shoes hit the manicured
lawn on the other side of the wall and I didn’t plan to stop
there.

Pooling on the run is harder than pooling
while locked in a car’s trunk, but I figured I could managed
something bigger than normal and still do whatever I needed to do.
Besides my pool, I had my static ring fully charged, my fists and
feet just like the old days, and my pair of surprise artifacts.
Both of which were completely useless to me unless things stopped
going the way Annie B planned and started going the way I planned
them.

She wasn’t going to like that.

Sneaking all the way in, getting the item,
sneaking out. I’d stolen things before and there’s a thrill in it.
Lots of little stuff as a kid before my time at the Asylum, then
some bigger stuff when I finally reached the Asylum. Get in under
the morning fog, steal the Shaky Stick, get out under the morning
fog, and take off. But then what? I’d been thinking about it since
the San Francisco vault, letting events percolate in my devious
little mind.

Standing in that vault, I wanted to study
it
. The only artifacts I’d ever seen were the stuff at the
Asylum Russell and Plutarch played with. The Guild of Artificers
might
have had something equal that could make the amount of
anima saturation but I doubt it . . . sitting in my workshop,
running the anima conversion formulas on what it would take, even
over a hundred years being locked up, accounting for the accident
in 1989 . . . if I built something like it today, it would have
cost tens of millions in anima, maybe more. Either some artificer
had access to an army of geomancers once upon a time, or . . .
Shaky Stick made its own anima somehow.

I had to study it
.

It could change everything
.

But if events proceeded like they were meant
to, like Annie B planned . . . if we snuck in, stole it, snuck out,
if I didn’t get to use my pair of surprises I’d designed just for
the occasion . . . Well, maybe I’d only known her for two days, but
I’d fought her, seen her operate,
had sex with her
, I knew
Annie B wasn’t going to let me get more than a glance of her
Earthquake Baton
before she drove it back to San
Francisco.

Mission Accomplished. Cash is on the bedside
table, King Henry, thanks for the quick tickle when I thought I
might actually die.

This outcome is unacceptable.

Which meant the moment I touched down on the
other side of the wall it became time for King Henry’s plan to
start. Annie B would just have to survive it. I’d already given her
what she wanted—it was time for what
I
wanted.

“Are we in someone’s backyard?” I asked in a
voice fit for a library but not fit for a theft in progress. “Is
that a fucking swing set?”

Annie B turned to look at me with a
dangerous slowness in her stance, this kind of predator-like
stillness, her whole body locked tight but pivoting on her
feet.

“You little son-of-a-bitch,” she hissed at
me, eyes not quite sure if she should glare or let them go wide
with fear.

[CLICK]

We’d left San Francisco at dusk, got to
Fresno an hour later. It was winter, so we waited on sunrise at my
shop, me working, her pacing, checking her knives, generally in a
sour mood. She’d stepped into my workroom six times total,
fretting, asking questions about my work that I’d answered with
lies.

“Fog thickening artifact,” I’d mumbled over
and over. Number three or four, I can’t remember which, she came in
with a determined expression, sitting down in a spare chair I had
leaning against a wall for when T-Bone designed with me.

She waited until I looked at her and gave
her some type of what-are-you-doing? motion with my hands . . .
then her clothes started coming off one by one, staring at me more
boldly than any human woman I’ve ever seen.

I worked through it, piece by piece, small
smirk on my face. By the time she finished there wasn’t a bit of
fabric left, nothing but that glinting
B
and a body that
could get a stiffy out of a dead man. She leaned back in the chair,
ankles crossed, all her good parts—and she has a great many good
parts—visible.

“Last chance,” she told me with that flick
of her tongue to her top lip.

“You really bet Ceinwyn some serious cash,
didn’t you?” I asked with my smirk still prominent. Damn . . .
that’s a view, let me tell you . . . the kind of body a woman would
make for herself . . . since really, that’s what it is. Vamps don’t
have to bother with plastic surgeons or silicone or Botox, they
just get to improve their shell the way they like it naturally, and
Annie B liked it mighty fine.

“Do I disgust you so much, King Henry?” she
asked, a sudden flashback to the quick expression on the airplane,
the expression of a monster who doesn’t want to be a monster.

“Nope, you’re gorgeous. Tell you the truth .
. . I’m even kind of over the whole strangled with a rope of blood
thing.” I kept working, no time to waste, even for horny vampires.
“And for that body I might be convinced to forget about the whole
cannibalism incident.”

“Then
what
?” Annie B growled, putting
her clothes back on since she realized it wasn’t going anywhere
yet again
.

“You try too hard.”

“I don’t have time for soft . . . never have
had time for soft in my life,” she murmured, snapping on her bra,
much to my pupils’ regret. “Now it’s worse . . . I could be dead
tomorrow. Can’t you give me a parting gift? One last tumble? Think
of the ego boost.” Still without her sweater or jeans, she got up
to lean over my worktable, sliding in next to me, whispering in my
ear with enough seduction that my formula paper got fuzzy as my
eyes went cross, “I’ll let you trap me in the table again if that’s
the way you’d like it. You can be in control . . . I’d just be
stuck, helpless . . .”

I turned toward her and of course, being
her, she didn’t back up. She had trouble with submissive. We were
inches apart and there would be no retreat. “I don’t have time for
this right now, Annie B.”

We were the same height when she wore heels.
Which means I got the full on force of her pleading with me.
“Please . . .”

I put down my pencil and paper. Her eyes,
damn weren’t they big and brown and the most emotive things I’d
seen in months. Her body pressed against me, pleading as well. Her
knee along my thigh, her other foot pressed against my heel, her
breasts so close they disappeared inside the excess of my
unbuttoned coat. She was really using the Dead Soldier Ploy.
I
might die in the war tomorrow, those nasty Japs and Nazis
.

The fucking Dead Soldier Ploy.

Guess I’m a bitch. Cuz I fell for it, for
just one second, but once you taste an apple so sweet it’s the only
thing on your mind until you’ve finished it. It was enough to doom
me all the way.

I kissed her, a little peck on the lips. She
followed me as I pulled back, hungry, but I raised my hand to her
cheek, holding her back. “No vampire shit,” I whispered.

“Fine . . .”

“No eating me, Annie,” I told her, catching
her eye and dropping the B to give the name some intimacy between
us instead of the teasing connotation it had held before.

“Fine,” she whispered back, lips closing on
my mouth for something more prolonged than the first one. Lasting
about ten seconds, with a playing swap of tongues, it’s the
scariest kiss of my life. Scarier than my first kiss with Sally
when I didn’t know if I did it right. More unknown about what could
happen than even virgin sex.

In that moment, I realized supermodel body
or not I’d never get over the cannibalism and I’d never forget the
strangled by blood thing either. I would never be able to trick
myself into thinking she’s actually as human as she looks.

“I . . . can’t do this . . . bad idea . .
.”

“Please,” she begged again, throwing her
lips at my neck, hands running up inside of my coat, pulling it
down, her leg wrapping all the way around my thigh, almost up to my
waist as she grabbed onto me. “It’s not about the bet,” she
whispered as she dropped my coat to the floor, hands finding my
shirt next. “I’m really going to die.”

“You’re not,” I told her, but not doing a
thing to stop my shirt coming off either. “I wouldn’t let ‘em.”

She laughed at me. “Men . . . humans . . .
sure I am. We’ll get caught and the duke will deny he has the Baton
and then I’ll duel him and I’ll die because if I
don’t
duel
him Inanina will do something worse to me as punishment—probably
take my shell away . . . make me live in a glass prison for failing
her.

“You can’t imagine the agony of it, hard and
unforgiving and unmoving and then they offer to let guests light
fires under it, heating it up like they’re some cruel child with
one of your hamster mazes. No eyes to see your innocent faces, no
ears to hear your hopeful voices, no skin to feel,” she ran her
hands over my chest to exclaim her point better than any little
excited period ever did. “Please give me this.” Her face pressed
against my wide shoulders, teeth nipping. “I won’t tell anyone.
I’ll lie to Ceinwyn, lose the bet, even if I
do
live.
Please, King Henry . . . give me one good memory of this last day .
. . so I can have the strength to choose death and not what’s worse
. . .”

Dead Soldier Ploy.

You try saying ‘
no
’ to it some
time.

It’s impossible.

Why you think we had a Baby Boom anyway?

I gave in to her. Maybe I couldn’t trick
myself into thinking she’s human. She’s a vamp. She used us as
shells. She ate us. But if she could fear and want to hold on to
something and feel completely vulnerable before death then maybe
Vamps weren’t completely worthless . . . just mostly. “My back
office has a bed.”

She didn’t smile, she cried. “Thank you,”
she said, probably the most honest as I’ve ever seen her.

And while I describe a lot of stuff I
probably shouldn’t during these tapes, you ain’t getting what
happened next. No one would confuse me with a gentleman, but I
still ain’t telling.

[CLICK]

Inside the gated community, she wasn’t
happy. The reason we’d waited, the reason I had time to make a pair
of artifacts and also had time to give Annie B something to
remember me by—which, okay, I was going to remember for a very long
time too—was ‘cuz we’d been waiting for sunrise. Sunrise is when
the vast majority of vampires go to sleep, even in a Fresno
winter.

Except . . . sleeping Vamps are still Vamps.
Let dragons lie
as it’s said. They’re going to hear someone
making fun of their swing set even if they’re asleep. Which is why
the bedroom light turned on, along with the sound of unpracticed
but vigorous cursing. Great . . . my plan was working and Annie B’s
got fucked over a chair with a twist.