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.
Annie B grabbing me by the throat and hauling me through the backyard hadn’t been in my plan, but it happened anyway. So did her switching me into a fireman’s carry despite my not so quiet protests and her launching the pair of us over a backyard gate in a single sure leap, booted feet smashing down against concrete on the opposite side.
Annie B didn’t stop. I hung on for my life as she sprinted away from the house, down a driveway and out onto the road. There was a man-made—or vamp-made I suppose—lake in the middle of the place, with the homes build all around it in an oval, so every home had a lakefront view, nothing on the other side distracting them. Seemed like a waste of space, but that’s rich people for you.
Annie B knew where she was heading even if I didn’t. To me it all looked the same, what I could see of it with the Fog still holding on. For morning, even for morning in the winter with gray all around, the place looked deserted. A normal neighborhood you’d expect kids walking to school, cars packing up for work—sure, it wouldn’t be a busy summer afternoon, but there would be little specks of life inside the gray.
Here, in the gated vamp community, there was nothing. 8AM and they were all in bed, or at least all inside. It was only Annie B hauling me at thirty miles-per-hour, no suspension, no seat, my ribs banging into her shoulders, my hands grabbing onto her arms and chest in a purely I-don’t-want-to-smash-into-the-pavement kind of way that’s not sexy at all. Behind us, the one lone beacon of light faded away.
No one followed.
Well . . . crap.
I got dropped to the ground without much love. Guess I’m-going-to-die sex doesn’t buy you as much as it used too.
“Pretty impressive, what’s your forty time?” I groaned another question.
Her whole body quivered. Her velvet eyes went especially dark in the gray. All around her, vapor twisted. “Why?”
“Huh?” I asked, rolling to my stomach and pushing up.
“Why after I told you to shut up are you still fucking talking, you asshole?” she screeched at me, louder than I’d ever been.
“What?”
“Do I have to rip your tongue out?” she asked like it might be a serious possibility.
“Pretty sure I’d scream if you did.”
A pair of house lights near us came on. Annie B paused to watch them. “Did you really not understand the part about how if we get caught I’m going to die?”
I winked. “I won’t let you.”
I had the warning of her face scrunching up only a moment before she punched me in the chest, just like in the car. I managed to turn my shoulder in time and didn’t collapse to the pavement yet again, instead I only felt like I should collapse to the pavement.
“You can’t stop it!” she growled at me, eyes flashing.
Another light turned on.
“We need to get to the Fresno Embassy,” I told her.
She blinked at me, unable to believe the words coming out of my mouth. “Through the entire community?”
“Sneaking is a bad idea, sorry, but this is better.”
Her hands found my coat, pulling me right up close to her face. “Then why didn’t you point it out before we set off, if you had so many concerns?” she hissed.
“Well . . . you never would have changed the plan to do it my way.”
Another light turned on.
“Trust me,” I continued. “I got this totally under control.”
She pushed me back hard enough that I fell on my ass. Which is not of the plump and well-cushioned variety. “If I’m forced from my body, King Henry, I’m taking yours. For your sake, I hope you do have it under control.”
Yup, I’m-going-to-die sex definitely doesn’t have much shelf life nowadays.
“What’s going on here?” came from the nearest driveway.
A skinny guy in a pair of boxers and nothing else stood with his arms crossed, typical pissed-off neighbor expression on his face, just a touch below a glare. For all the world normal, but vampire given his lack of clothing.
Weird.
“I’m all for some morning funny, but keep it down, you hear? Some of us don’t have the constitution for the day-humping.”
Day-humping . . . I liked that one better than blood-whore, but not as good as sun-fucker.
“I can’t believe this shit actually exists,” came out of my mouth.
The vampire guy’s expression changed as he actually stopped being pissed and moved towards seeing us for who we were. We’d cleaned up after the hump-that-shall-not-be-talked-about, gone was my Carebears band-aid, the ring of blood around my neck, and all the obvious stuff. But we weren’t dressed for . . . morning funny.
I had on a new pair of jeans, a fresh shirt, and a spare geomancer coat of deep brown—$49.95 at the Asylum Administration building—a sign that said mancer to anyone that knew we existed, and my static ring glinted on my finger, the initials of KHP shining, might as well have flashed ‘artifact’ over and over like a neon sign.
Annie B had dressed to kill, her darkest clothing, her jacket, a pistol at her hip and a pair of knives hanging from the other side. Then there’s her choker and that great big B at her throat and the fact that—she looked like what she looked like. Even among vampires she’s downright, stop-your-breath stunning. For wanting to be sneaking, the woman sure did stand out.
The vamp guy’s eyes went wide. “Baroness?” he asked.
That well known? Hadn’t guessed that . . .
Annie B moved across the rest of the street and into his space before either he or I could react. A knife sprung in each hand, a slice and dice job on the way.
Odds were the guy’s a gentleman, so give h
im a hundred years, maybe more, maybe less, but nothing extra special. Just like the average mancer doesn’t get in a life or death fight and find their extra tricks, it had to be the same for vampires. This guy probably ate off donors, his death count a handful out-of-necessity types. But Annie B . . . she knew what to do to him.
Trust me . . . the woman has tricks.
She sliced out his throat first, a backhand slash that went right across his vocal cords, biting deep but not deep enough to hit his spine. Her other hand stabbed, three quick gut wounds, painful as hell. Then she stopped, apparently finished. It wouldn’t kill him. I figured that right off the bat. She’d shut him up and put him down. Guess killing random vampires ain’t in her protocols, just those connected to the theft.
At her feet, vampire guy bled a pool of red goo.
“How long we got?” I asked as she trotted back to me and grabbed my shoulder to get me jogging with her.
“Not long.”
“Like a minute not long or five minutes not long?”
More house lights were going online.
“More like a minute.” She glanced over her shoulder. “Not from him. One of those houses will phone the embassy about a vampire sneaking around with a human. They’ll send out what will look like your usual rent-a-cop patrol car, but is really gentles trained for combat to protect the embassy.”
“Sounds like fun.”
“Fuck you, King Henry.”
“Love you too, Annie.”
I was more out of breath than Annie B as we hurried down the street. In fact, she wasn’t out of breath at all. Douchebag showoff vampires.
“Why did you do this?”
“It will work out,” I gasped, shouldn’t have made her pick up drive-through before we came, the indigestion was brutal. “Trust me. I got this.”
“Tell me now,” she growled.
“We get into the embassy, we get caught, you kill the duke, I take care of the Shaky Stick. Simple.”
The Foul Mouth and the Fanged Lady Page 22