Nicer than Ceinwyn’s car too. “You’re doing well for yourself then?”
She nodded with a smile, a little nervous, maybe a little ashamed too. “I settled in Washington, up north, not DC . . . and worked my way through community college, got a secretary position, have a boyfriend . . . it’s pretty nice and normal. I like it . . .”
I was just tall enough to see into the SUV’s interior; plush leather, premium electronics. My eyes caught the child-lock. I had a dreadful thought. The Mancy finds itself. “Anything ever break around you?” I asked, serious.
She seemed confused. “What’s that mean?”
“Start any fires, walk on water, hear voices in your head?”
“King Henry . . . you’re not sick like Mom, are you?”
I gave her a hard look. “No, I’m fine. Are you?”
“Of course not,” she said, giving me an expression back that said I might be a little sick. “What are they teaching you at that school? New Age Religion?”
“Something like that.”
Susan opened a door and stepped inside to the driver’s seat. “I thought about taking you with me when I left the first time, but you were so young and so much trouble and it probably would have been considered kidnapping if they caught me with you . . . so I talked myself out of it.”
“It’s okay Susan,” I told her, giving her conscience an ease. “It worked out for me. You go have your normal life, big sis. One of us should get to.”
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.
Session 110
“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.
“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.
The Foul Mouth and the Fanged Lady Page 21