The Foul Mouth and the Fanged Lady (32 page)

“Not just
a
girl . . .
the
girl . . .
my
girl . . .”

“Valentine again?”

“Yup, dumped me off cold at third base.
You’re out, King Henry Price. Next attempt . . . three
innings.”

“Perhaps you should get another girlfriend
that’s more interested in what
you’re
often interested.”
Quilt could sure be tactful when he wanted to be.

“I will . . .” I leaned down to put my face
on the tabletop. “This is nice and cool.”

“Where are your friends, by the way?”

My forehead on the table, I said into the
wood, “I left them for a day. Needed alone time.”

“I’m always here when you need to talk,”
Quilt reminded me like we weren’t already doing just that.

“I know . . . Miss Dale ain’t here though?
That’s who I’m hoping to see . . . you see . . . I see . . . we all
see . . .”

Quilt blinked. “No, C.D’s in Jamaica last I
heard. Geomancer we think, maybe even an Artificer like you.”

“Slave like me, you mean. Can’t do what we
want; only what the Learning Council orders us to do.”

Quilt probably had a facial reaction
resembling enlightenment, but I was too busy staring at my
reflection in the table to check. “
Ah
. . . that’s what this
is about.”

“Yeah. I don’t get to have fun deciding and
thinking over my options at the Jobs Fair, do I?” A fist pounded on
the table. “Nope, I have to be a Guild Artificer. Making the same
boring shit that’s been approved for fifty years.”

“There’re reasons for the rules.”

“There’s reasons for prisons too.”

“Right . . . have you even been to their
tent?”

“For like a minute. They look like
cocksuckers with those hats.”

“You can’t
not
see them, K.H,” Quilt
pointed out, “they’ll just set up a private meeting for tomorrow.
Which, now you’ll have to go through with a hangover.”

“I figure I can avoid them for at least
another week,” I said to my reflection, which didn’t look too
hot.

Quilt tried a different route. “Fine, what
else would you want to be then? You’re always talking about how you
already get Artificer principles and could go ahead, yet now you’re
complaining? You can’t have it both ways.”

I sighed. He had me there.

Some time went by.

“Oh . . .” said a voice. “Sorry . . .”

I raised my eyes just in time to see Val’s
sunshine-like hair as she twisted around quick-like and exited
without saying anything more. Quilt was nice enough to not make a
comment.

He gave me more time to sit there and think,
maybe sober up a little, forget about the Guild and Val both. “I
love the Mancy. It’s the best part of my life. I’d do anything to
become an Artificer . . . but one thing, and that’s become a slave
to someone else’s rules. I don’t work that way. It’d end bad for
both of us.”

“But is there a way out of it?”

Scooping up a bit of dirt from the tent’s
floor, I sprinkled the gravel out on the tabletop. A burst of anima
I’d been saving up magnetized the dirt, pulling it together until
it formed a hand, with a single finger pointing at the stack of
papers. “So tell me about recruiting, Quilt. Give me the
pitch.”

Quilt studied me through the rims of his
glasses, alternated between my face and the hand on the tabletop.
“You’ve got wonderful control of anima, you know that?”

“That’s what Mr. Gullick tells me. Maybe I
should try to date Naomi . . . she’s got a nice pair of tits . . .
I used to be into tits . . . tits and air conditioning . . . if
only Miranda could stand the sight of me, eh?”

“Sometimes, when you’re showing off what a
genius you can be with the Mancy . . . I forget how crude you are .
. .”

“Yup, that’s me . . . little foul mouth
fucker . . . Guild of Artificers Member No. 62523. I even get a
lunchbox.”

Quilt ignored my sulking. “You really think
you’re Recruiter material? You have to know how to read
people.”

“I do that really well actually . . . other
than Val at least . . . impossible crazy woman . . .”

“You think the Lady will allow it?”

The dirt hand kept on pointing. “I know Miss
Dale will fight for me . . . whatever I decide to do.”

Quilt gave me a pat on the back with the
force of a coked-out Chihuahua behind it. “I will too, K.H.”

“If only your opinion counted for anything,
Quilt . . .” I muttered.

“Recruiters,” Quilt continued in a deeper
voice to let me know he had ignored my opinions about his opinion,
“are our frontline against all forms of supernatural troubles . .
.”

“Baroness Boleyn,” a voice called from the
door, “As stupid as always I see.”

The Shaky Stick sat in the middle of the
room. The room itself had to be some kind of dance floor most of
the time, or at least what was pretending to be a dance
floor—though what do I know about Vamps? Maybe they like to get
down with their bad selves?

On the dance floor stood a foldout table and
on the table sat the Shaky Stick, lying on its side among that
pop-wrap stuff kid’s love to play with during Christmas.

The moment Annie B and I stepped inside we’d
met each other’s eyes. It might as well have had a sign that read
‘
touch and a cage will fall on top of you
’.

It’s a trap, but why is it a trap? We both
asked ourselves that. I could see the crinkle across Annie B’s
forehead. She was thinking, just like me.

San Francisco wants to get rid of the Shaky
Stick because it ain’t safe . . . so they pay the Fresno Embassy to
take it. Sure, in this scenario, we are going to get jumped in the
room as the Fresno vampires realized what we’re there for. That’s
in my plan. That’s the way I wanted it. But this . . . this was
long term.

This trap had been set up in advance.

We’d made a mistake.

We’d assumed the obvious of why Fresno would
take the Shaky Stick from San Francisco, but Sideburns hadn’t been
all that knowledgeable about it. It was guesswork—and it was
wrong
guesswork. If we’d played it Annie B’s way and snuck
in we
still
would have walked into it.

Having crossed the dance floor, standing an
arm’s length from the Shaky Stick and hearing the mocking voice
shatter its way right into my worries . . . Sideburns had
definitely been full of shit. About twenty vampires full of
shit—that’s how many burst from the doors into the room to join us
and not a one of them pretended to be gated community rent-a-cops.
The reason is because all of them were nuns . . . twenty vampire
nuns, ready to kill us.

Okay . . . I’m full of shit too.

Not nuns.

But trust me, after you hear what really
went down in that room, you’ll be thinking twenty vampire nuns
would be a lot less weird.

What actually happened?

I ran into someone more holy than a nun.

“We’re in trouble,” Annie B whispered.

The vampires didn’t seem to have guns.
That’s good. “The duke here?”

“Worse.”

“Worse than if you have to duel the
duke?”

A strange expression came over Annie B’s
face. “For me? Better trained opponent but not as old as the duke.
For you? You aren’t exiting this room alive if I die.”

I scanned them all, weighing their threat
levels just like I did every person I came in contact with. Normal
clothes, mix of races and ethnicities, all of them young, none
older than thirty. Men and women both, different heights and body
types, but, whatever the type, it was a perfected version of
it—plenty of fit muscle, little flab. And of course, they were
vampires, which means the only way to kill them is to destroy their
hearts.

And me fresh out of wooden
stakes
.

My eyes stopped at a woman being bracketed
by a pair of particular buff guys. Tall, red headed with her hair
pulled back behind her so it
v
-ed down around her eyes. She
had a dress on, simple and white, not modern, old-fashioned. Not
decorative, like something a peasant would wear without any cut,
but immaculately clean and pressed. Virginal.

At her hip hung a longsword.

What the burninating-the-village fuck?

“I don’t plan on letting you die, remember?”
I told Annie B while not taking my eyes from the lady with the
sword. She was pretty, could have been beautiful, but wasn’t
bothered in trying. She quirked her lips when I spoke. Guess that
meant no secrets. Vamp hearing, it’s all out in the open.

Annie B had no expression at all. Her hands
were on her knives. “Countess d’Arc, as sanctimonious as always I
see.”

The vampires formed a circle. They were all
smirking, smug, some even laughed. They had us outnumbered
ten-to-one, if those were my odds I’d have been smirking too. But
I’m on the other side.

My thoughts were flashing with some good
curse words. Whole sentences of them. My eyes danced around the
room. Down at the floor. At the ceiling. At the walls. At the
vampires’ clothing. Metal beams in the ceiling. Not a whole lot
else to use the Mancy on.

The Countess . . . d’Arc . . . wait a sec, I
just got that . . .
holy fuck
! That’s way better than
vampire nuns! “You’ve got to be kidding me with these names.”

D’Arc bowed to me. “We are very long lived.”
She gave Annie B a grimace. “Sadly.”

“So she’s saying she’s
the
Joan of
Arc and you actually are
the
Anne Boleyn?” I growled out.
“What the fuck, Annie B? Thomas Jefferson going to pop out next?
Maybe Genghis Khan? What is this? A shitty
Bill and Ted
movie?”

“Shut up, King Henry.” Annie B didn’t have
the senses available to deal with me; her eyes, ears, and
everything else focused on d’Arc. “This was you from the
beginning.”

“Yes,” d’Arc said, her hand resting on her
sword’s pommel. “I promised you would pay, Boleyn. You had no right
to interfere.”

“Where’s Duke Cassius?” Annie B asked, her
arms tensing like she might fling her knives into d’Arc’s body at
any moment. “If you’ve killed him, you won’t long survive me.”

“I’m not stupid like you . . . I do not
murder innocents without the merest hint of evidence, I do not
punish the innocent!” d’Arc screamed back.

“Then what?”

“I have restrained him.” A humorless smile.
“In glass.”

There were gasps from some of the vampires
in the circle. Apparently not all of them had been keyed in to the
teamspeak channel.

Annie B seized on it. “I hope you all know
that you’ll suffer together. Whatever the Countess d’Arc has done,
you’ll be guilty of as well.”

D’Arc waved the accusation away. “They are
all loyal to me; you need not bother trying to rend them away.
Every single one shall watch as I kill you.”

“Timeout on that, if you don’t mind,” I
interrupted. “Why does there even need to be killing here? You went
to a lot of work for this, lady: stole something that you shouldn’t
have, paid off the guards, gathered a hit squad. What did Annie B
do to you that could be
that bad
? Let me guess . . . stole
an old boyfriend?”

Anger crossed that pure face, leaving it
blotchy. “She killed my servant.”

“Your European history can’t be good enough
that you would care,” Annie B decided for me. “But he was a noble
loyal to Louis XIV, a king who caused far too many troubles against
the Papacy’s enemies; I was ordered to remove him as my first
mission as a baroness. You see, King Henry, Joan has often been
rebellious against our masters, while I have done whatever was
ordered of me. Yet . . .
I’m the bad girl
.”

“You had no right to destroy him
with
the body!” Joan drew her longsword . . . it was long.

“It was an accident! It was my first
mission!” Annie B screamed back, pulling her knives, one in each
hand. “I’ve offered time and again to pay you reparations for the
mistake, haven’t I?”

“Money is the Devil’s tool! It will never
bring him back!”

“I can’t time travel, Joan, so that’s all
you get!”

“Wrong, Boleyn,
very wrong
.” D’Arc
did some flashy salute with the sword that looked dangerous. “I get
to return the favor back unto you.”

“Timeout, damn it!” I interrupted. “Did I
not say timeout?”

I grabbed Annie B by the elbow and hauled
her a few steps away from d’Arc, into the very center of the
circle. “
Chill out
, alright?” I told her, my hand sliding my
first surprise artifact into her jacket pocket. She felt it there;
I could see her flinch as she felt it against her side. “Just like
in my shop, no need to get bent out of shape,” I hinted.

Understanding flashed in her eyes. “You
smart bastard.”

“Told you I wouldn’t let you die,” I said
with a grin.

D’Arc laughed, her sword’s tip buried in the
dance floor, the hilt crossed to the ground. “The two of us want
this. We have built to this moment for hundreds of years. You think
you can stop it, little human?”

Short joke . . . got to love ‘em. “Are you
two telling me that you Vamps are still fighting over the
Reformation in the 21
^st
century? That your whole culture
is two-sided between Papacy and Protestant after all us humans
stopped giving a shit centuries ago?”

“No,” Annie B corrected, “Vampires have long
grudges, but even we’ve given up on that. What I’m telling you is
that Joan is a pious cunt who can’t let things be.”

“
Pious cunt
? You fucking dare, you
little slut?” d’Arc yelled.

“Whoa now, even I don’t use that word,” I
said to buy more time. “I mean ‘
twat
,’ yeah, I’ll give you
‘
twat
’. ‘
Twat
’ is funny. It sounds like a giggle. But
‘
cunt
’? Nothing funny about ‘
cunt
’. It’s like
‘
faggot
’ and ‘
nigger
,’ even HBO thinks twice before
they use those words. You can’t use ‘
cunt
,’ Annie B. You got
to call her a pious twat.” The circle of vampires were open-mouthed
and wide-eyed. “See! A few of them even want to laugh.”