The Foul Mouth and the Fanged Lady

by Richard Raley

  Her heels looked sharp. I reminded myself I didn’t want to get kicked again that night. “Ceinwyn didn’t send me. I informed Ceinwyn about my problem and then she mentioned you might be helpful. She seemed to think you could handle yourself but I decided I’d test you out.”

  “I’m going to guess I passed since I’m alive.”

  “Yes, you passed.” Annie B walked over to me and sat on the bed. “You passed after the first fight. I was going to bring you here and we were going to play a bit and then I was going to tell you everything I needed from you. From your reputation and a joke of Ceinwyn’s I never thought you would turn down a little tumble. The second fight was very naughty, King Henry.”

  “So you thought that since you have the best ass I’ve ever seen,” I figured, “you’d just wiggle it and I’d do whatever you wanted?”

  She licked her lips again. “Something like that.”

  “Did you tell this idea to Ceinwyn?” I asked.

  “Yes . . . she seemed to think there was a chance it could work.”

  I started laughing. Ceinwyn Dale. Still testing me. Still seeing which way I jumped. And not just me either. “You got taken, Annie B.”

  Her tongue disappeared. Her lips went straight. “She knew you well?”

  “Yeah, she knows me as well as anyone does.”

  “She used us to test each other,” she thought aloud.

  “Yeah, like that.”

  I’d seen the look that came over Annie B’s face before. Usually I was the one wearing it when Ceinwyn screwed with me. “I’m almost five-hundred years old and she treats me like a toy,” she said in a hiss.

  “Only twenty-two, but yeah . . . feeling ya.”

  She studied me. “Will you still help me?”

  There’s an interesting question. As I ruminated, already knowing the answer, I couldn’t help but feel the irony that it wasn’t going to be my dick getting me into trouble with this gorgeous creature, but my brain. “It’s really leaking anima?” I asked.

  “We believe so. We, however, only have a simple geomancer in our service.”

  I ruminated about it some more. My brain’s going to get me killed one day. “And you’re paying me?”

  “Of course.”

  “And you won’t eat me again?”

  For the first time since she’d come into my shop and my life, Annie B seemed embarrassed. “I’m sorry our misunderstanding led to your blood being required,” she mouthed out, like it was a great difficulty. I suppose it was. Not like I told pigs sorry before I ate bacon. If I told bacon anything it was, ‘you’re so yummy! Yes, you are!’

  “Well . . . I guess dropping a car on you was a bit much . . .”

  “A bit shocking, yes,” she agreed. “So was the ring.”

  “I want it back,” I told her.

  “Of course.”

  “And my vial of anima.”

  “It as well.”

  “And the Cold Cuffs.”

  With a perfectly innocent face she said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Session 4

  I woke up in easily the most comfortable bed I had slept in at that point in my fourteen-year-old life. You know what . . . check that, the bed is still the most comfortable I’ve ever slept in. It was missing the embrace of a beautiful and hopefully naked woman, plus the musk of ten hours of raging grunting and humping sessions, but we won’t hold it against the bed. That’s not the bed’s fault. So most comfortable ever, created by expense and a lack of use most likely. Ceinwyn Dale’s guestroom bed.

  Yeah, that’s where I was. Took me awhile to realize it.

  First, I had to remember the day before ending with the giant needle into my neck. That wasn’t very damned pleasurable. Here’s free advice, children: bring up the blindfold before the needle comes into play, because once the needle comes into play the bastard is entering your body and it’s not going in the fun places people generally like to get poked.

  I sat myself up to have a look-see. Some say you can take a look at what a person’s home has in it and say what they’re like. I don’t know if that’s true. Probably bullshit like all the rest. If a person’s poor, they’re going to have poor shit. If a person’s rich, they’re going to have rich shit. What the fuck does that have to do with personality?

  Ceinwyn Dale’s guestroom is clean, wood floors and soft rugs. Blues and whites . . . very—airy, as it were. There were pictures too. Made the same way she had made my little one of Mom and Dad. Mountains and villages, town houses, shanties by the sea. Tons of tiny little pictures taking up the walls. Small looking large by being all together.

  Ceinwyn Dale is the Head of Recruiting for the Asylum, she’s flown throughout the world and back again. How many late arrives have woken up in the bed just like I did? I ask myself, looking back on it.

  Most kids, it’s easy. Parents are mancers or someone in the family is—there are whole computers dedicated to family trees somewhere in the administration offices in the vain attempt to figure out why one family member is a mancer and another ain’t. Others . . . mancers keep an eye out around their neighbors. Little Val caught the dog on fire. Cousin Heinrich talks to his dead grandfather. That kind of thing.

  Another common way is for countries friendly to the United States, without schools of their own, to offer up an exchange student for cash. Sure, Europe has had a school of their own for almost as long as the Asylum has been around, so do the old USSR countries and China. Ottoman Empire used to have one, the Papacy too. India had built one, and Brazil was working on it by the time I got recruited—think they just finished it actually. But if you’re from shithole Nigeria or equally shithole Mexico like two of my classmates were? Ceinwyn Dale is going to be the one to bring you to the Asylum.

  Sometimes it ain’t even shithole countries, it’s just population problems. Ratio breeds true as they say—they got computers for it too. Do the math. You got seven million people in your country . . . this means you got twenty-seven Ultras, one born every three years we’ll assume. You got yourself a fourteen-year-old sciomancer from Israel and no sciomancer to train her; you can either ship her to one of the schools or let her go insane. What do you do? A sciomancer . . . especially a Shadeshifter, that’s a valuable tool to let rust. For Eva Reti, you have a meeting with a smiling blond lady and your family up and moves to the Unites States on a seven year visa.

  Immigration, Ceinwyn Dale’s biggest weapon.

  As for how I was found . . . let’s just say I made a lot of noise. When hasn’t that been true of my life?

  I woke up pissed that day. I’d been drugged and hadn’t been drugged enough. No cigarettes by the bedside. No cigarettes in the room. I’d had one smoke the day before, below my average as it was, and no more were in sight for the new day dawned. None of my stuff was in sight. So I woke up pissed off. More than usual.

  Not a good thing for me or anyone I was going to meet that day—especially Heinrich Welf, but we’ll get to that Nazi asshole later.

  The pictures followed me into the hallway. Kids. Tons of them. One after another, smiling or glaring, it didn’t matter—black, yellow, red, one punk girl with green hair, every color under the sun and some so white it looked like they went without it, all of them watching the hesitant, exploring steps I took.

  My feet were bare on the wood. Someone had changed my clothes, which I tried to pretend was a purely magical transformation and not Ceinwyn Dale stripping me naked. Gone were jeans and t-shirt. Instead I was in some kind of uniform. I knew it was coming but I still hated it, even though it was probably more comfortable than a uniform has a right to being.

  Long legs, some undershirt, and a coat. Fucking coat in the summer. Even in the mountains, that’s an unusual cruel. We were always hot during the summers at the Asylum, save for the cryomancers. You know, all these years wondering about it and I think I finally just figured out what Welf saw in Hope Hunting. Must have cooled him off like a popsicle.

  Popping the coat
buttons open and pulling the shirt loose from its tuck into my pants was the first gesture of rebellion I took directly against the Asylum and not against Ceinwyn Dale. Rebel without a cause, my next feat was finding a bathroom to scowl into a mirror. She’d given me a haircut too. Okie-long hair was gone and in its place I had a conformist-trimmed cut. It made me look ten. Like I should be holding my mommy’s hand.

  As for the uniform, it was a deep brown job. Think fertile soil, not dog crap. Get that mind out the gutter, that’s my fucking job. All deep brown, a rich lush fabric. Probably the most expensive thing I’d ever worn up to that point. Lot of records set that day.

  There were tags sewn on the front breast. White. One was my name: King Henry Price. Second one was my year: Single. In case you’re wondering, years go Single, Bi, Tri, Quad, Pent, Hex, and Hep with a corresponding visual aid. For fourteen-year-old-me it was a lonesome little dot. The third was my class number, blank at the moment. The forth was my Mancy, Ceinwyn Dale had already jumped the gun and added ‘Geomancer’.

  Okay, maybe with the coat unbuttoned and the shirt out the uniform wasn’t too bad. Kind of rakish outsider going for it. But the hair, that’s bullshit. I’d been growing that piece-of-shit, bangy mullet for years, man! It was redneck cool.

  I found her in the kitchen.

  Ceinwyn Dale leaned back in a chair, at ease with the world, slim-fingers grasping the stem of a cup probably holding more latte. Robed in some kind of slinky fabric, a long leg was exposed on its way to the floor, but the rest of her stayed hidden. The leg distracted fourteen-year-old-me and I temporarily forgot I was supposed to be mad at her for a good twenty seconds. I didn’t know they made those things that long . . .

  Sitting down the cup, a flick of Ceinwyn Dale’s wrist engulfed the leg back inside her robe, where it hid with the rest of her. Her other hand hadn’t left her newspaper—we still had those back then—while her always present smile twitched.

  Without looking my way, she commented on my near drooling, “Enjoying a show, King Henry?”

  I remembered I was pissed at her. Being made fun of often has a crystallizing effect on my anger, no matter how much I’ve learned to control it . . . and the amount of that is a truthful not very much even today as a wise and learned graduate of the Asylum. Wise and learned. It’s on the diploma. “Not as much as you enjoyed the show last night, bitch.”

  “Are we really back to that, King Henry?”

  “You drugged me!”

  “School policy.”

  “With a giant needle!”

  “Would you have rather I used a rag dipped in chloroform?”

  “You shaved my head down to nothing too.”

  “You really should thank me if you ever want to find yourself a girlfriend in the next four years.” A sip of latte broke up the scold. “We don’t allow much at the Institution but we do allow love to bloom . . . not that much would bloom with the ill-layered mop you called hair. But now . . . maybe a little. Just like the rest of you.”

  “Whatever, I’m over it. Where are my cigarettes at then?”

  “Ah . . . we come to the root of the problem.” Her eyes twinkling, she motioned for me to sit at the table with her. I did . . . reluctantly. “Love blooming and maybe even turning our gaze the other way when it comes to love making. However, there’s no smoking at this school, even for teachers.”

  I was already starting to get a headache, my fingers reaching for my pocket where I had always kept my pack. “You’ve got to be shitting me. I’ve smoked for like over a year . . .”

  “You’ll survive, King Henry.”

  She got up, got me a glass of water, and sat it down in front of me.

  “I quit,” I said. “I’ll walk if I have to.”

  “Too late. You’re enrolled. Four years at least. Testing later today, then you’ll meet your classmates. It should be exciting for you. No fighting though, we don’t allow it either.”

  Behind me on the wall, a piece of new-aged metal artwork shattered into a thousand pieces, clanging down onto the floorboards in a waterfall of steel. Musical notes piled on top of one another in an imitation of a high school garage band, though the falling metal probably had more talent.

  There was shocked silence from the both of us in the aftermath. I lowered my head. “Sorry . . .”

  “You’re as bad as a pyromancer, you know that?” Ceinwyn Dale accused.

  “I said sorry. Maybe if I had a cigarette I wouldn’t be so irritable,” I tried to reason with her. Also a first for me. “I got a ‘D’ in Drug Ed but I’m guessing it’s a side effect, me being so understanding and lovable usually.”

  Ceinwyn Dale actually tutted me. “The nicotine will be out of your system in a few days. You haven’t had the habit for long . . . you’ll survive, King Henry,” she repeated, adding, “We’ve had children addicted to far worse make it.”

  “Oh?”

  “None of your business.”

  She returned to her paper.

  I sipped my water for a bit, looking out the back door at a wooded yard. There was some kind of red bird picking at the bark. Nature Science, also a ‘D’. Be lucky I know what a bird is. “Where are we?”

  “The Institution of Elements, Learning Academy and Nature Camp.”

  “Looks like the suburbs out there . . . with trees.”

  “Each of the staff has a house for themselves and their family. Though, size depends on your position in the rank hierarchy.” Ceinwyn Dale’s expression was bored. With me, with the paper, even with the Asylum. I suppose after the ten-billionth time, the explanations get old. Plus, Ceinwyn Dale ain’t exactly the type of person who sits drinking coffee at the table with a newspaper every morning. For my stay at the place, she was away from the Asylum more than she was there.

  At the table of boredom, her paper turned a page in her hand. She’s one of those people who folds the pages and destroys the paper by reading it. Just selfish.

  I drank more water, watching the red bird get all horny with his bark picking. “Don’t suppose you have a TV?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Everyone has a TV.”

  “I’m not here enough to bother.”

  “Ah . . . so I’m not living here with you? There’s a relief.” False bravado. Ceinwyn Dale and I fought but I didn’t mind it and, bereft of my parents, I gladly would have latched onto her house as a home, especially a home with a busy parental figure.

  “Once you’re tested, you’ll be assigned a room with your classmates—they’re communal,” she droned.

  My headache flared. Communal. I didn’t know what the word meant back then, but it sounded both hippie and communist at the same time and that had to be a bad thing. “Good, you couldn’t contain yourself for long after what you saw last night.”

  The smile twitched. “I don’t recall seeing anything worth remembering.”

  “That’s just mean . . .”

  “Of course, memory is a funny creature,” she continued running over my pride. “As an example, if one was dosed up with a certain drug, they might not remember changing into new clothes or taking a shower or even whining through a haircut.”

  Oh crap.

  I thought about it. Damn if it wasn’t a perfect mind fuck. Still don’t know one way or the other to this day. Suppose I could make a joke about the birthmark on my ass when she ain’t expecting it and see if Ceinwyn has a reaction or not.

  “You’re full of it.”

  “You’ll never know.” Might as well have cursed me. Not that the Mancy can curse . . . but to use the expression in the common vernacular. The education again. Gone way past communal.

  She switched to the business section, ruining more dead tree and stinking ink.

  “You live in this big house all alone?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Must be high ranking.”

  “Yes.”

  “Don’t think you could handle me, so I’m not offering, but you should get a guy. You’d make a swell
mom with all the threats and stuff. Do the dishes or I’ll papercut you! Take out the garbage or it’s a ball of air!”

  Her paper finally lowered. “I did . . . have a guy once . . . he died.”

  One of the few times I’ve ever seen Ceinwyn Dale get emotional enough to be near tears. Fourteen-year-old-me went awkward. “Sorry about that, Miss Dale. Bet he liked your legs.”

  “If I give you the sports section will you shut up?”

  “No promises.”

  [CLICK]

  After awhile, Ceinwyn Dale headed to the shower with the promise that if I even went near the bathroom door, she’d know and would react accordingly, which I took to mean papercuts, a mouthful of air, and probably some horrible affliction I hadn’t thought of yet that involved my asshole.

  The unknown is often more terrifying than the known . . . more beautiful too. Us humans love and fear the uncharted map. Once you get the game down, game gets boring. We don’t have any uncharted left, which is probably why we’re so screwed up now.

  Fourteen-year-old-me stayed away from the door. Instead, I went about making me some eggs—no bacon or sausages in Ceinwyn Dale’s cupboards—so I had to settle for cheese, pepper, and a couple herbs sprinkled in and scrambled. Helping Dad in the kitchen again. First time that day I thought of him . . . followed by thinking of Mom.

  Probably a mistake.

  Mom.

  A mancer like me.

  Dad always said she was a special woman. I tried not to think about it, but it was hard not to. Ceinwyn Dale said the Mancy drove you insane if you didn’t use it right—one of the few things Ceinwyn Dale told the total truth about—and suddenly my screwed up life wasn’t the blame of one cowardly screw-up parent but partly the product of fate or chance or an asshole universe that likes to play with people and God and dice and strings and crap.

  Some mancers start thinking of the Mancy as the enemy, you can see why. Me—never. It’s my ticket out of my shithole. But I felt bad about Mom for the first time in years. I felt bad about Mom, about her being crazy, about me being away from her for at least four years, for not being able to help her.