The Foul Mouth and the Fanged Lady (5 page)

“Speaking of that, satisfy some curiosity on
this . . . how
did
you imagine it?”

A brief bit of embarrassment crossed his lit
up face, his forehead crinkling. “Stole it from a fantasy
novel.”

“
Shit . . .
”

“I know, you hate the things.”

I shook my head. Hated them? Nope, I was
jealous that the douchebags had it so easy with their ‘magic’. The
Mancy’s a long way from some gay wand flipping and twirling. “Next,
you’ll want me to make you a lightsaber.”

His eyes got bright with crazy dreams.
“Could you?”

“Get the fuck out of my store,” I told him.
If I ever did make something even resembling a laser sword, Tyson
Bonnie was the last person I was trusting with it. He’s mean with a
Wii U remote, but he’d cut his arm off in five seconds with
anything real.

“Okay,” T-Bone agreed, “no more sci-fi
stuff, we stick to real theory. But it did work this time.”

“It did,” I said, wondering privately what
robe-wearing-fruit out there in bookland had a magic punching ring.
“Worked wonders.”

“What’s the power level on it?” he
asked.

“Bit more than a taser. It will put a man
down good, as for a Were or something else? Not like I can test
it.”

I’d worked for weeks on the damn thing
figuring it out. Burned through enough anima to wear both T-Bone
and myself ragged. But in the end I created something that hadn’t
existed before. Every time I did it I felt a little relief from my
worries. The cocksucking Guild of Artificers didn’t have a damn
thing like these rings. Let them try to make them. They’d probably
start with a pure electro-anima version before they even realized
what I’d done. Then they’d be stumped for months.

“Feedback is minimal, mostly a tingle of
static in your fingers, nothing serious. I’d take it off before you
play with your computers and game systems though.”

“Oh . . . sounds like a good warning.”
T-Bone worked as a computer consultant for about twenty different
companies around the Valley, called in to help them with their
security setups. In the oldest days, Stormcallers were left doing
lightning rod duty before Benjamin Franklin came along to invent
the more permanent version of a metal shaft, then it was work for
power companies and Edison regulating flows. Now that the world
runs off the 1 and 0’s of binary code, the question ain’t ‘what can
Stormcallers do?’ it is ‘what
can’t
Stormcallers do?’

“And the activation?” he asked.

“Anima burst, no matter the Mancy.”

His face went frown. “Isn’t that dangerous?
Accidents happen.”

“It was the biggest problem after I figured
out the how of it,” I explained to alleviate any fears of an
accidental discharge frying your poodle. “Hair trigger and you’re
zapping yourself every time some heavy emotion makes you bleed
anima, too tough and you’re left with the same problem we all face:
got to sit around on your ass building anima up while bad shit is
happening to you.”

“So what did you settle on?”

“Five seconds,” I said.

“Better than five minutes.”

“Sixty times better last I checked.”

He put his hand out to shake. The hand with
the ring on it despite the fact it was the left one and T-Bone’s a
righty.

I flipped him off.

It made T-Bone smile, his teeth a flash of
white against his dark lips. Guy had a big smile. “I had to try,
old electric finger gag.”

“It’s not a toy,” I reminded him.

Problem with growing up middle class is you
don’t realize the world will smack you in the face. You think it’s
okay to play around. T-Bone is a good guy. He just needs a smack.
Usually the Asylum provides a few, but for T-Bone, he went through
in a year known for its easy-going kids who got along. He didn’t
have a Welf. Or even a Soto. A whole class of Maliks . . . how
boring . . .

“I know, I know,” he said, but I could tell
he was going to zap someone with it like it was a practical joke.
Well . . . as long as it wasn’t me, why should I give a crap?
That’s some King Henry wisdom right there.

He pulled out his wallet with a raised
eyebrow. “Cash?”

Cash.

I remembered what cash looked like.
Sometimes the old ladies gave me some of it. I’d yet to get paid
money for my Artificer work. All trades. Creation for anima. Copies
for myself. Anima vials to build other stuff. Imagine trying to
build a table that takes thirteen different types of wood and all
you have in your own backyard is a tree of one type. That’s what
it’s like being an Artificer free from the Guild. I needed anima
worse than I needed cash. Ceinwyn owned my future already. What’s
another million?

When I pulled out an anima containment vial
from under the register, T-Bone gave me a big grin. He put out his
thumb and stuck it to the metal top of the vial. I felt the flash
of anima drain from him and into it, trapped by the Artificer’s
gift. “I know you so well I was saving up.”

I shrugged. “I need to make more rings,
means I need more anima. It’s the way it works.”

“Yeah, I know.” Turning his eyes away from
mine he stayed silent for a bit, before he seemed to come to a
conclusion about the quality of my product. “If you give me like .
. . twenty-five percent on their sells? I can donate to you about
once a week. Maybe twice if it’s light at work.”

Hell . . . every once in a while even King
Henry Price sees the sun through the gray. How about that?

“Sounds great, T-Bone.”

“Don’t call me that, King Henry.”

“Want to shake on it?”

He studied my static ring. “How long has it
been on your finger charging up?”

I smirked. Only thing to do when you get
caught. “Since I opened the store.”

“Right . . . think I’m going to take off
then and do without the ambulance.”

“New video game?” I asked.

I can’t be sure since this is all by memory,
but if I had to guess it was likely a Tuesday. T-Bone would always
come into my shop and then go get his newest video games that just
came out. Sometimes I’d even go back to his place with him and play
some myself, try to forget about anima and artificing for a few
hours, but that was in the future. That particular day he just
nodded. “Always,” he told me.

Then we shook hands.

The ones without the rings.

Ceinwyn Dale gave my
excited
little
ass a whole day to ‘
settle my affairs
’. She just
might
have been mocking me and the girlfriend with that word
usage.

What amazes me most looking back is how
quickly my
jaded
little ass took up the idea of the
Institution of Elements as being a great place to go to. I suppose
it’s similar to the amazement you see on the faces of kids, no
matter how abused or screwed up they may be, when they get to go to
the zoo for the first time. Something about the wonder in newness,
the joy of the unexplainable, as if the Mancy or watching a lion
can fix all that’s wrong with the world. Hope . . . they call that
word. Or I suppose I might not be as much of a badass as I thought
I was. Whatever the reason, for the first time in my messed up life
I was interested in something other than stealing, smoking,
fighting, or fucking, and I threw myself into not screwing it
up.

After Ceinwyn Dale left with her
paperwork—and my soul tied up in a nice set of strings—Dad made
dinner. Some kind of stir-fry with bright veggies and big pieces of
fat marbled beef. Peppery enough to burn your lips. I’ve always had
a thing for pepper. Mom made margaritas. Dad had one in place of
his usual nightly joint. Not enough to get him drunk or mean,
luckily for me.

We talked.

About how it was a good chance for me. About
how I had to behave myself and watch my mouth, about how if I was
good, Ceinwyn Dale said they’d let me come home in the summer and
Dad would come pick me up.

My parents might as well have asked me to
shit gold-foil origami cranes, but after all the talk Ceinwyn Dale
had fed them, how the Asylum was a remedial school with hard-nosed
but caring outlooks, complete with enough bullshit statistics to
make my brain hurt like I’d gulped a gallon of slushie, it was
expected to get some parenting for once. Mom ended the forced
lovefest with, “time for bed, King Henry Price,” already tipsy and
eyeing my father’s wide shoulders like she had a habit of doing
when particular thoughts were circulating inside her head.

And I went to bed. Smoked a last cig for the
day. Probably whacked one out too. Gross, horny teenagers and their
nasty impulses. Disgusting, eh? Was probably thinking about Ceinwyn
Dale when I did it too. What, you were expecting a glass of water
and a bed time story?

[CLICK]

Mom woke me up the next day to get ready for
school. To which I responded, most of my goodwill already gone from
the night before, “Why the fuck I want to go to school when I’m not
going there no more?”

“You don’t want to say goodbye to your
friends?” Mom asked. Another ‘Good Day’. Two in a row.

I thought about my
friends
. Yeah.
Guys-that-bet-on-me-to-score-cash is a better term. “Not really.
They won’t give a shit.”

“No little ladies to break hearts with
goodbyes?” I hadn’t told her about the girlfriend. But then, she
occasionally was the one who washed the clothes, so she might have
figured out something was going on when she smelled the sex and
cheap-teenage-girl perfume on them.

“Nope, not really,” I lied.

Mom pouted at me. Big curvy lips worked
wonders for her and she always liked to pout to get her way. Even
though she was closing in on forty.
Especially
since she was
closing in on forty. “I still have to sign you out of the school,
King Henry Price.”

Well . . . shit. She had me there.

I dressed. Jeans. T-shirt with a
pro-wrestler on it this time. It might have been ‘
fake
’ but
there was blood and big-breasted women, and that made it okay in my
book. Wallet with twenty bucks in it I’d stolen from my math
teacher’s purse earlier in the week. House keys I wouldn’t need
after that day. A mouth freshener spray-can. And that was it. No
knife. Like Ceinwyn Dale noticed, I got off on the impact of a
punch. Also no cell-phone—not enough money made at Shithole Price
to waste it on text messaging.

Mom dressed too. Dress, makeup, her dark
hair done up real nice. It really sucks having a hot mom.

An example of this being when we got into
the principal’s office and he flirted with her the whole time she
signed
more
papers to get me off the school rolls all while
Mr. Brett hoped to get Mom out of her dress.

“Really, Mrs. Price, it’s no problem at
all.”

“I’d hoped not.”

“A very simple process.”

“I’ve always found it easy too . . .”

While he was distracted by my mother’s hips,
tits, and lips, I launched a preemptive attack by stealing Mr.
Brett’s car keys and his flash drive hanging half out of his
pocket. What was he going to do, expel me? I doubted Ceinwyn Dale
would care. I wasn’t stupid—uneducated sure, but I could put two
and two together and her little tricks and my lucky accidents were
linked.

When Mr. Brett finished drooling at my mom
we left, King Henry Price officially off the rolls of Redwood High.
Free at last! Free at last! Strings be cut! Strings be cut!

But not quite.

“Now we go home, right?”

“I’m thinking about doing some
shopping.”

“Like . . . what kind of shopping?”

Mom’s smile told me she wasn’t done with me
yet.

Ceinwyn Dale assured my parents that the
Institution of Elements would take care of my clothing needs, since
everyone wore uniforms—real Commie Kim Jung Il shit—but Mom felt
the need to spend some of my father’s hard earned money at the
Visalia Mall trying to get me a suitcase, grooming kit, shavers,
stuff like that. We actually had a pretty good time,
considering.

The biggest problem with Mom’s ‘Good Days’
is that she’s happy during them. That might seem ass-backwards but
imagine someone being a total crank to you probably three-hundred
days a year,
at best
they could be zombiefied and care less
if you existed. But for the other sixty-five days, at random, they
love you. Completely—with no reserve. And they don’t understand why
you don’t love them back, or why you’re mad, since for some reason
they can’t remember being a cranky zombie.

That’s a ‘Good Day’.

It gets real hard to forget all the crap and
be nice after awhile. Mom had been having ‘Good Days’ for over half
my life, so it was extra hard to forget by then, but since it’s the
last time I’d have to do it for awhile, I gave it a shot and had
some fun shopping with my mom, even when she tried to embarrass me
in
Victoria’s Secret
.

“What ‘bout this one?”

“This is child endangerment or
something.”

“How dare I treat you like a grown-up . .
.”

“Mom, I could be fifty and I wouldn’t want
to hear about your lingerie.”

“How ‘bout this one?”

Mostly I tried to make accidents happen. I
thought at the time that Ceinwyn Dale’s hinting screwed my luck up
. . . that actually knowing what was going on, about the Mancy,
completely shut me down. One of those ‘
only invisible when no
one is looking
’ things. In reality, fourteen-year-old-me pushed
around anima like a pyromancer would and the geomancer juices got
all blocked up worse than a week’s constipation.

Ignition versus solidity.

After I had my travel goods—complete with a
few new comics that had actually been bought for my car trip—and
Mom had some new skimpy things I tried not to think about, we
stopped by the food court and gorged some sodas and burgers.