“So cold,” she groaned.
Shit, I forgot about the whole Cold Cuffs experience. Guess this place was the same. “Handle your high, Fanged Lady. You ain’t dying to me cursing up some vamp royalty, but I sure as fuck ain’t dying because you’re too busy humping a pole.”
Her forehead found the floor as she rolled over. “You’re right . . . and it will only get worse.”
I reached down to grab her arm, pulling her up. She leaned on me like she’d drunk . . . like she drank down six or seven glasses of high quality booze. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“Sorry . . . you’ll be doing the talking anyway. Lack of blood, alcohol, then what’s coming . . . it all adds up. Not my fault you wouldn’t succumb to me. Really . . . and that was my sluttiest shirt too.”
I kind of like her like this, I realized. Must be all the time I spent with drunk college girls before Val. Course . . . I was drunk then too.
“Just lean on me and shut up.”
“Hmmm, yes, that’s nice.”
“Keep walking.”
“It’s just the cold. I promise I’m usually more composed. You always catch me at my worst.”
“Yeah, cold. I think that’s probably why they designed it this way.”
“You have no idea. Wait until we reach the Divine Chamber. I’ll barely be able to think.”
“Divine Chamber?”
“Up ahead.”
“What are they, vampire gods?”
“No, just the eldest of us.”
“How old?”
“Older than you.”
“I’d hope so.”
“I meant humanity. Or your civilization at least.”
Right, just great. Million dollars, dumbass, a million dollars.
Eventually we came to a receptionist sitting in front of a triangular door the size of the entire hallway. The secretary or whatever was a female vampire with dark skin and white hair, long legs hiding behind her desk. She had on a gray skirt-suit you’d expect out of any Fortune 500 secretary, but wore it like a model on the runway instead of the actual secretaries who bought the things.
She looked at me like I ruined the décor. “May I help you?”
I nudged Annie B with an elbow.
She smiled at the other vampire, swaying just enough so you noticed she wasn’t one-hundred percent. “Baroness Anne Boleyn with Artificer King Henry Price for the Divine Inanina.”
The secretary checked a small computer screen, hitting a keypad. “Divine Inanina, Divine Nii-Vah, and Divine Eresha will be sitting in quorum.”
Annie B paled more than usual. “Eresha?”
“It was her property stolen as well as her area of influence.”
Annie B paled even more. “I wasn’t aware the insult was personal.”
“Don’t worry, Boleyn, Nii-Vah will keep them from killing each other.”
“We hope,” Annie B whispered.
The secretary continued, “Remember not to move from the circle once you’re inside of it.” Then for me, “Do not approach the table unless invited, do not respond unless invited, and do not attempt to pool anima while inside. If you have a pool, release it now.”
Well . . . that’s unfortunate.
The secretary had a glass of water on the desk so cold it was more slush than fluid. So I broke the damn thing. Waste of glass. Waste of a nice sized pool of geo-anima too.
The secretary glared at Annie B like she was the one who had done something. “Housebreak your next toy, please.”
“What?” I asked, affronted that someone thought I should or could become civilized.
Annie B nodded at a kind of board thing on the side of the desk. “In the grown-up world, mancers use an element board to safely throw extra anima into instead of breaking glasses.”
An element board?
It had a few different cubes of material to manipulate on it, enough for those mancers that didn’t have easy places to throw a pool into. Part of it was dirt. Huh. They should’ve had those at school. Releasing a pool is always chancy, better to focus it and waste it on something showy.
Besides . . . lot more fun that way too.
Look, Ma, magic!
“Well now the yokel knows, don’t he?”
The secretary touched her broken glass. “So it’s true.”
Double huh.
“Open sesame, Pepper Potts, we got a meeting.”
[CLICK]
The Divine Chamber was massive, as massive as Meteyos’ cave in the Geo Realm, only here there was light allowing you to see every inch of it.
Unlike a disgraced, imprisoned dragon, the Divines had nothing to hide, felt no shame in their power.
Pale white marble. LED lights too, no need to be old-fashioned. Red, pink, and white, making it look like strips of blood running circular up the walls in tightening patterns of veins. The strips pulsed, in time with a heartbeat. Almost like . . . you were inside of a body, surrounded, blood all around.
In front of us was a table. Long, thin, rectangular. Also white marble. It had grooves in it. So did the floor. Thirteen seats, also uncomfortable as fuck marble. No cushions. Guess when you can turn off your pain receptors you don’t have to worry about bench butt.
It was also really hot. The last thing I expected. Annie could barely stand now. Completely shit faced. If I had to guess, I’d say the temperature was at an even ninety-eight-point-six. How else for a vampire to prove how powerful and fed and pampered they are than to conduct meetings in heat that sends the common vampire into near insanity?
No one else was in the room yet, just Annie and me.
And a shit ton of empty space.
As we stepped through the triangular door, it closed shut behind us. The thing hadn’t opened at the middle, but dropped down. Now it rose up, one huge fang of a spike. I turned to watch, trying to figure out if it really went whole into the ground or if it was segmented.
That’s when I noticed the glass cylinders and glass bulbs on the wall.
And the blood trapped inside of them.
And the gas vents lit afire underneath.
There had to be thousands.
Thousands of bloody pools moving in pain from all the direct heat.
Every one trying to find a way out of their glass prison.
Thousands of vampires . . . free of their shells, on display as they were tortured for every second of every day. Nameless, forgotten, nothing but a puddle.
Annie B was very careful not to turn around. Yet she’d have no choice if we wanted to return the way we came. That was the point.
We stopped in a circle at the very center of the room, maybe twenty feet from the table. I grabbed her arm again, made sure she didn’t sway. “You’re really doing a sucky job at the ex-girlfriend act.”
There was sweat on her brow and on her neck already. She was overheating after less than a minute in here. “I promise to be a real bitch once I can think straight.”
“Fine. Just don’t sniff me again, please.”
“Some men consider that a turn on.”
The room felt like a sauna to me, I couldn’t imagine what it was like for her. “I’m lucky enough not to know any of them.”
There was another door past the marble table, this one a classic double door, made of thick mahogany. It opened and some big, burly, overly-muscled male vampires came through.
Six of them.
Each pair carried a body between them.
There we go, even bigger gulp from the crazy bottle.
The three bodies, all female, were clothed, but otherwise . . . unoccupied. Each was placed in a chair, one directly center and the other two at the far ends of the table. Positioned so they leaned without slipping to the floor, next an arm was placed on the table. A silver knife appeared, cut a gash in a each palm, then disappeared.
No blood came from the wounds.
Job done, the six vamp guys exited the way they’d entered. But left the bodies behind.
“Seriously?” I growled at Annie B. �
�Fucking seriously?”
“What?” she asked innocently . . . as innocently as Annie B got, at least.
“This shit. It never stops overflowing.”
“You’re handling the ceremony much better than most do,” she helpfully told me.
“Just shove it in your hole, ya drunk,” I growled some more, still being used as a post to lean against.
“Have I ever mentioned how arousing you are when you’re so solid and unmovable?” she murmured.
Nothing else to do, I studied the three bodies.
Three women.
Shells of the highest quality in three completely different styles. They looked asleep for the most part. Don’t get me wrong . . . they were, for all purposes, dead as a doorknob at the moment. No breathing, no pulse, just dead unmoving flesh. But they weren’t actually dead. Just not currently used. Cells weren’t rotting, flesh wasn’t shrinking.
They just . . . sat there.
Waiting.
For a driver.
Gross ass vampires. Second you start to feel the least bit sorry for one of them, they prove how completely fucked up they are.
Annie B will eat on you, she’ll kick your ass, she’ll seduce you into doing things you know you shouldn’t do, and she’s kind of an unrepentant cannibal from what I’ve gathered. But she’s also been around humans long enough to envy us, has friends among us, and has never given up or stepped out of her original body.
She’s faked it for so long, she was kind of human . . . at times. Like with the drunk thing happening now. I could relate to her. Feel bad for her. Hate her too. Feel something other than . . .
Revulsion.
I could feel nothing but revulsion looking at these empty shells. Dead people. Human beings repurposed as clothing.
Disgust and anger.
Always anger with me.
Angry enough . . . well, they’re lucky I didn’t have a pool. Or their pretty wall of glass bulbs would be broken and we’d be staging ourselves a prison break.
The room went red for a few seconds before returning to its heartbeat of LED veins. It took me another moment before I noticed the three pools of jelly-like crimson blood, moving across the floor along the ruts carved into the marble.
They moved like sea creatures on the sea floor. Quick flashes of elongation followed by contraction. Big puddle, small puddle. Disgusting, alright. I turned to Anne to give her another ‘fucking seriously,’ but found her on her knees, sweating forehead bowed. “Like that, is it?” I asked her instead.
She didn’t look up at me. “You’re supposed to join me, but I know I’ll never get you to kneel in reverence at anything,” she slurred.
Not even for Meteyos, especially not for this shit. Not for blood creatures sliding along toward three dead bodies.
There must have been holes in the table legs since the un-bodied vampires went for them and slowly pooled up onto the table top next to each body. They waited until they were completely together before feeling for the cut in each palm. Slowly, they started the next process of sliding inside to make themselves at home.
The blood pools weren’t even fully inside before three pairs of eyes snapped open, three hearts started beating, and three pairs of lungs breathed in a big gulp of hot air.
It was almost worse than the Geo Realm experience. This was happening on Earth. In California. In Shit Magnet Los Angeles, only a little over two-hundred miles from my shop in Fresno. Happening in the ‘real’ world. Not the magic fantasy land with the black-skinned dwarfs flopping around offending every Tolkien fan by not having a single beard in sight.
Fuck, fuck, fuckity fuck.
Fuck.
Want another?
Fuck!
The one on our right was the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen. No exaggeration. Val, Annie B, Ceinwyn, Hope, any of the other gorgeous ladies I’ve run across in my life, they were all behind her. She was so beautiful she didn’t look human.
Some vampires really pretty up their shells—Annie B’s one of them—but using her as an example, even if you look at her slim build with some serious bust on it and think: chick won the genetic lottery, the body manipulation is still in the realm of possibility, even if it’s extremely unlikely. This . . .
Not sexy. Not like Annie B.
Didn’t have ‘it.’ Not like Val.
More like Hope. Just this classic beauty. Perfect face. Perfect shoulders and collar bones. Perfect waist. She had on some toga-like dress, so I can’t comment on the knockers, but I’m sure they were . . . just so. No scars. No moles. No freckles.
Unblemished by imperfection.
A face so unspoiled that every other woman had to be judged against her. A face so textbook that when she walked into a room or stood next to another woman it immediately highlighted every flaw on every other face within eyesight.
Yet . . . she wasn’t the least bit attractive.
Annie B’s right. I care for Val too much to cheat on her. If I ever hurt her that way . . . I’d probably eat a shotgun. But . . . I still got some chub if Annie B flaunted herself across my path. Anne’s shell was the shell of a mind that understood attraction and human sexual desire. The vamp on the right didn’t. Had never bothered to.
She was just . . . perfection.
There’s this idea in video games and computer animation that T-Bone’s mentioned a few times to me called the Uncanny Valley. Basically . . . the closer you are to a human, but aren’t accurately human, the more it freaks people out looking at the fake. The eyes ain’t right or the hair ain’t right or a thousand things just ain’t right . . . they just look like someone made those things, placed those facial features.
Here it was in the flesh, not no video game, not no android. A vampire sitting in front of me, breathing, waking up, studying me in turn.
Vamp in the middle had a Chinese shell. My “Guess the Asian” ain’t actually that hot for reasons I’ll not go into in an attempt to not insult every slanty-eyed, ching-chang, commie-lover more than usual.
. . . What?
With this shell, it was the clothing that gave the game away. A green-gold, dragon-print dress as bright as any emerald covered her from the neck down. Her face was pretty, youthful, and soft. Dark hair piled on top of her head, held back by an elaborate golden headpiece, but she could have just as easily thrown on sweats and a t-shirt to disappear into any crowd. She was tiny as well, maybe even delicate, no show of height or strength here.
Not what you expect from someone claiming to be a Divine.
Yet it was a statement of power and of status if you looked at it from the vampire point of view: my shell is ordinary in every way. I need not jewels. I need neither glitz nor glamour. I am not new wealth, not even old wealth, I am of the eldest wealth. I am beyond you in my simplicity.
Would have to keep an eye on that one.
The vamp on our left was playing fertility goddess with her shell. It was oddly arousing. Big, full breasts just slightly drooping, big wide hips that in motion would move all night long; not actually fat, but enough meat on her that her stomach pouch was prominently noticeable. Even her body was bigger than you expected out of vampire women. Muscled legs, muscled shoulders. She could have thrown you around the bedroom, no problem.
Red hair, dark eyes, freckled, so the Miranda Daniels flashback was a total boner-killer. Large cheekbones, wide nose, big lips and jaw. Not something you’re used to seeing on someone of Celtic stock.
No simplicity here. There was something . . . there . . . about her. Something that made you think about the features and the colors and wonder what was bothering you. She wanted you to get all the pieces and clues too, since her clothing was nothing but a white dress so thin to be see-through.
I took another pass over her, trying to put it together.
She smiled over the attempt.
It was cruel.
It belittled me.
And all of humanity along with me.
Since I’m King Henry Price, I show
ed my teeth in a snarl and responded in kind.
“Which one of you is the bottom bitch then?” I asked.
First time I ever heard Annie B gasp in shock.
Session 43
“Did you really need to do that?” Ceinwyn asked when we were back on the road.
“Would you have bought me a pack?”
She barked a ‘ha!’
“I thought not . . . so yeah, I really had to. Besides, look at all the prime reading material I’ve gotten for us. Oh look, a whole magazine devoted to our new plutocratic overlord, Prince George, ain’t we lucky!”
“Keep it to yourself or I’ll kick you out of the car,” Ceinwyn informed me in a tone of voice that spoke volumes about how serious the threat was: very serious.
“That old heart so crippled it don’t like hearing about love creating a baby, Miss Dale?”
Her smile went flinty. “I’ve had love enough for a lifetime, King Henry. It’s a very overrated emotion.”
My ears perked up and my trashy magazine fell closed into my lap. “Know you had a guy, but you never talk about him.”
“He’s gone and his murderer is dead. What else is there to say, King Henry?”
Pulling out my pack of cigs, I studied the box labels. Will cause cancer . . . no shit. It’s fucking poison and tar, no shit it will kill you. I shook the pack, smirked at the feel of the full weight in my hand. “What was he like?”
“Gentle, kind, selfless. He wasn’t strong, only a faunamancer. I was the strong one . . . and I didn’t see the threat until it was too late.”
I tore off the plastic wrap, pushed open the pack. I ran it under my nose, the lightest of smells igniting pathways in my brain that had long been dormant. Yummy, yummy, poison. “Ain’t no reason to let love die, Miss Dale.”
Ceinwyn snorted. “The most pessimistic fourteen-year-old I’ve ever met talking about love and hope.”
“Yeah, guess I might’ve been a bad influence on them, but Pocket, Raj, and Jesus brought out my softer side . . . well, not Jesus. Pocket and Raj though.”
“And Valentine?”
“Keeps burning me, but I keep reaching for that flame,” I agreed with her. Speaking of the flame, I pulled out my stolen lighter and sparked it to test it out.
The Foul Mouth and the Headless Hunny (The King Henry Tapes) Page 10