This ain’t good . . . this so is bad.
Run for the door, King Henry, you might make it to the elevator before she tackles you.
But I followed her.
To an armory. Damn . . . and I thought I was turned on earlier. “Why didn’t you just show me this place if you wanted me to have sex with you?” I asked.
Annie B’s clothes almost magically dropped from her body and to the floor. “Who says I’m trying to have sex with you and that I’m not just torturing you to the very limit of you giving into your desire?”
Naked as a baby again and she didn’t even pay me the slightest attention as she went about the room selecting weapons and appropriately troubleseeking clothing from the racks. A handgun, her twin knives, and a flip-out baton joined a leather coat, jeans, boots, and a tight black top. All her kick ass gear.
Done with herself, she turned to me. “You need a change of clothing too.”
“Unless you—”
“Ransacked your shop?” she finished for me.
I got angry for the first time that day. “You fucking bitch.”
“A fucking bitch . . . just like old times between us,” she sighed theatrically. “Yes, if you remember from our experience in the Divine Chamber, you were chosen for this assignment for many purposes, answering questions and allowing a team of barons to search your shop without you in it being two of them.”
She sat down her own clothes and pulled out a package to throw across the room at me. I caught it and opened it. Jeans, shoes, white t-shirt, and a geomancer’s coat. “Should I expect my porn collection to have been stolen as well?”
“I saw a list of them,” she admitted, “I would have taken you for a blond man, with appropriate fake tans and breasts. Smarting for a dark haired beauty in your life while stuck to your little blond princess, King Henry?”
“They had a sale.” I had to ask it, “Find anything else interesting in my shop beside porn?”
She raised an eyebrow, still in no hurry to get clothed. “Should we have?”
You’d be dead if they found the Shaky Stick, so they didn’t find the Shaky Stick. “Any trap doors?”
Her mood wilted some. “I’m told Baron de Montbegon lost both of his legs. Complete incineration.”
I shrugged. “He’ll get better.”
“One wonders what you were hiding in that safe.”
Nothing. “One needs to put some clothes on.” Shaky Stick was safe, now I just had a hell of a mess to clean up when I returned to Fresno . . . and maybe a cop or two asking questions I’d need to dodge
“So do you,” she said, watching me like she expected me to get to it.
I’m not a shy guy, but hell no. Even Val wouldn’t trust me that far. Mancy knows I didn’t trust myself that far either. “I’ll be in the bathroom,” I told Annie B.
She smirked over the discomfort. “Make sure you take a shower too, you stink.”
I threw a pool of geo-anima into the bathroom lock to make sure nothing outside of breaking the door or another pool of geo-anima could open it.
Good thing too.
I heard her try the handle.
[CLICK]
Back to the Porsche that night after our five disappointing meetings.
“What nation?” I asked, dreading she’d say Coyote, which meant me calling my brother-in-law. My scheming, criminal kingpin brother-in-law. Sad thing is . . . after the last couple days, he’s not even in my Top Five when it comes to evil people in my life.
“Technically none,” Annie B said. “He’s an outcast.”
“How the fuck does that work?”
“I should really make you pay for all this information.”
“Deduct it from the fat check you’re giving me.”
“It’s not money I want you to pay with.”
“Can you please go back to the ex-girlfriend personality? I really didn’t mind it.”
She laughed at me, but stayed upbeat. I don’t think it had much to do with me almost cracking last night. It had more to do with Annie B being on the hunt again. She excels at seducing, but she’s even better at laying down the law. “Your schooling taught you about the origins of Weres?”
“Yeah, yeah, Incas, Aztecs, all the nations the Spanish smashed into the ground with steel and smallpox. Jaguar warriors could actually be jaguars and all that. There were societies belonging to different animals and the like. After that fell off and the Spanish took over, it went underground outside of Native American cultures to the north. Colonists arrived and they died off too, but even more colonists arrived and the lure of Totems spread to Europeans.
“With the population boom in the 1800s, immigrant and native groups used it to help build power, that’s why so many Were Nations had beginnings in criminal organizations. Some of them left that behind and gained respectability, others stayed with the drugs and easy money. Which is why you have groups as different as the Otters and Coyotes in California. Still never heard of any outcasts.”
“You get an ‘A’ for the oral presentation,” Annie B teased, “even though it’s not the oral I usually prefer.”
“That’s my fucking joke, Fanged Lady; stay on your own turf.”
She laughed again. “Were-ism didn’t stop spreading despite my kind’s best attempts at stopping it. Once those same immigrants returned to fight a pair of wars in Europe, Totems finally appeared in the Old World. Very secret at first and much slower than in the New World, but it’s still building up today.”
“What’s that have to do with outcasts?”
“It’s a new way for Nations to unload troublemakers without killing them. Old World Weres are sent here, New World Weres are sent there. Think of it as a student exchange program.”
“Just for hardened criminals.”
“Exactly.”
“So where’s our outcast come from?”
“He’s called the Tsar, from Russia. The old KGB experimented with Were-ism for its spies. When the Soviet Union broke up, those Weres went into crime like everyone else in the glorious new democracy. Our friend was on the other side of a power struggle, but lost narrowly enough that, to maintain order, he was banished instead of killed.”
“What kind of Nation? Bear of some kind?”
Annie B grinned at me. “Raven.”
“That’s a new one.”
[CLICK]
The Tsar ran his enterprise out of a strip club.
I respect that. Old school.
Ain’t no chicken buckets or a carwash in sight. Just glittered fake tits and buffalo wings that dripped with infinite sadness.
To say it wasn’t the best part of LA is an understatement. Not that any part of LA is the best part, so much as the less objectionable part of LA. Think: pimps, hoes, and corner dealers. Not: thousand dollar jeans made by Bangladeshi slave labor. Yeah, the fact that humans don’t exactly need vampires or mancers to really fuck themselves is the only thing keeping me from getting too bent out of shape about the new information clogging up my brain-pan.
Neither was it a part of LA objectionable enough that I expected Annie B to pull out her gun the second she exited her car and chamber a round before replacing it in its holster. “I thought you knew this guy?” I asked.
“Knowing him,” she said, stalking forward without waiting on me to follow, “is exactly why I’m going in armed.”
The strip club was called The Russian Doll. There was a sign. The neon outlined woman on it was not the kind of Russian doll you’ll find on Google. A large building, but not tall. Very wide and square. Ya know . . . a fucking strip club.
Good amount of other cars in the parking lot, some of them even newer. Few black SUVs off to a side with a goon watching them. Two bouncers at the door. Group of guys out on a bachelor party already leaving even though the night wasn’t that old.
What a bunch of pussies.
Annie B walked past them, every guy staring at her ass appreciatively. She ignored them . . . lucky for them.
The
bouncer smiled over her. He was big, but I’ve seen bigger. Tough, but I’ve seen tougher. Kind of guy who works construction and then moonlights for the free pussy, not from the strippers, but from the girls who get off on dating a guy tough enough to be a bouncer. “You come to audition, girl? You be center stage in no time!”
I’d describe the move-set Annie B used to knock him and his partner out, but it would be a waste of time. Instead, I’ll say that between the two of them they had a broken wrist, a broken nose, a black eye, sore balls, and few less teeth.
Took her three seconds, she didn’t even pause her forward momentum.
I stared at the poor bouncers for a bit. Inside the club, I could hear yelling.
“She your girlfriend, man?” one of the bachelor guys asked.
“That was badass!” another added.
I wish she was my girlfriend. If I was with my girlfriend, Val would have sweet talked her way inside in less time than Annie B did.
I checked my SDR on my finger and pulled my SEM-DEW out of its pocket. I had a ten-minute-pool. Enough to crack three guns.
The yelling turned into screams.
[CLICK]
I found Annie B up some stairs, inside a private office. She had her gun on a guy behind a desk.
There had been more bodies—unconscious—I followed them like a trail of breadcrumbs. That and the stream of people running away. And the screaming. And the limbs being broken. No gunshots though. Annie B must respect this guy. Or ammo is really expensive at the moment.
The guy behind the desk . . . the Tsar . . . was an older man with a face like granite and hair already white. There was a scar across his cheek and a chunk of his nose, making it look continually broken. He had on jeans and a plaid shirt with short sleeves. No tattoos marked his arms, just thick gray hair covering more scars, both from knives, gunshots, and claws.
“Baroness Boleyn,” the Tsar said in accented English worthy of a Bond villain, “I do love your entrances!”
The room cleared or not, Annie B kept the gun right where it was. “Igor, you look well.”
“Retirement suits me,” the Tsar said. “Do you mind if the girl under my desk runs out? You caught her in the middle of something.”
Annie B smirked, but gave no answer.
“That a ‘yes’? I don’t like conducting business with teeth that close to my privates. It reminds me of a bad fight I had with my second wife.”
“Let her go,” I said as my introduction to the room.
“You and your insufferable morality when it comes to saving helpless girls in bad situations,” Annie B complained.
“Let her go or I’ll snap your gun in half.”
“That’s a new trick from you.”
“I have more to show you if you ever move beyond breaking kneecaps.”
“Like?”
“Would you like to see how the Curator killed the vampires? He used the conjuration on me . . . what you think I’ve been practicing the last four months?”
The Tsar watched our back and forth with one eye, the other eye on the precarious situation his cock was in. “Did you get married without sending me an invitation, Anne?”
Annie B fumed. “Come out from under the desk, slowly.”
The blowjob lady—what else am I gonna call her? Mistress Suck-a-Lot?—stood up, pushing the Tsar back a foot in his desk chair. Annie B’s aim hadn’t shifted. If she shot at the Tsar, it would go right through the woman.
“Walk slowly around the edge of the room.”
Mistress Suck-a-Lot followed orders.
“Open the door for her, King Henry.”
“Sorry about this,” I told her, “I’m sure he was enjoying the effort.”
Stayed calm that whole time, but as soon as she was onto the stairs there was screaming and running.
People are weird.
“Now you can shoot him however many times you need,” I told Annie.
But she holstered the gun. “Going through these theatrics every time I see you is becoming old, Igor,” she refocused her complaints at the Were.
The Tsar attacked his pant zipper. “Can’t deal straight with vampires, bad for business all around!” he explained vigorously.
“Give me your phone number then.”
“I have no phone number. Why couldn’t you have arrived five minutes later? Such a waste of a talented girl’s time . . .”
“Better than wasting mine.”
“Bah, she’ll be dust and you’ll still be just as beautiful as ever!” the Tsar exclaimed. Coming around the table, he moved to kiss Annie B on her cheek until she waved him off.
“I know where those lips have been.”
“You wound me!”
“They have glitter on them,” I pointed out.
The Tsar frowned, pulling a handkerchief from somewhere and dabbing it on his lips. “Glitter, always glitter with this place. My shits have glitter in them! It makes my yearly colonoscopy most embarrassing for my doctor.” The Tsar motioned at me. “And who is this?”
“None of your business,” Annie said before I could tell him.
To throw him off or she trying to protect me? Has to be the first time in history if she is.
“Everything is my business,” the Tsar said, “that’s why you come to me when you’ve run out of people to beat information out of. Now, your name, young sir, or you can sit on the stairs outside with Elena.”
“She ran away.”
The Tsar sighed theatrically, shaking his head. “It used to be, when one of your strippers became the blowjob girl she had some loyalty towards you! What is this world coming to?”
“Feminism, it’s a real shame,” I deadpanned.
The Tsar’s head snapped back up. “Name or leave, vamp flunky.”
I snarled a predator’s grin at him. Old man, but he’s still measuring dicks to decide how dangerous the other guy is. I kind of respected him. Shit, I think if I live that long I might look a lot like him, old scarred up cuss. But I couldn’t give him an inch. I’m a mancer, he’s a Were. Way things are. “King Henry Price.”
The Tsar’s eyebrows rose up. “The one and only King Henry Price? In my strip club? You should be the one getting a blowjob! Boleyn, service the man!”
There was no act in Annie B kicking the guy across the room. I’ve been hit with those blows before. Hard enough to hurt, but not incapacitate. They’re Annie B’s way of having a conversation with you. “Do not presume friendship because of our long, mutual understanding, Igor.”
The Tsar dragged himself back to his feet, grunting. “She must actually like you boy, if she’s embarrassed for once in her life.”
Annie B made to stalk forward again, but I threw an arm out to block her path. She glared daggers at me. With her eyes . . . not the ones in her coat. “Just because you can break a gun now, doesn’t mean—”
“We need him able to talk,” I reminded her.
She calmed down a little. But only a little. “An apology or I kick you again, Igor.”
“Yes, yes, sorry, touchy touchy women . . .” the Tsar muttered, still rubbing his chest. “You kick like a horse . . . and that’s a compliment!”
“Thank you,” Annie said.
“King Henry Price,” the Tsar muttered some more, giving me a long look. “King Vega sent out a message about you six months ago. If I kill you, if any Were kills you, he’ll send his Python after them.”
This shocked the hell out of me. Vega must really love JoJo . . . or he really wants me to keep making artifacts with him. I managed to keep most of the shock off my face, hiding it with an I-don’t-care shrug. “He’s family.”
The Tsar’s eyebrows went higher. “You marry a cousin?”
“He married my sister.”
Now the Tsar’s eyes grew as well. “You’re Jordan’s brother?” he yelled loud enough to be heard outside the room . . . if everyone hadn’t already run away. “I love that girl! Such spunk! I was sad when she went back north, and then she goes Coyote on me
! Sad day, very sad day . . . I might have thought of making a new Totem if she’d offered to marry me.”
I’m pretty sure my face spoke for me . . . it said: murder. “She worked for you?”
“Not what you’re thinking!” The Tsar waved his hands. “Not a stripper, no. She was one of my spies, one of my flock.”
I calmed down some. I think I needed to have a heart-to-heart with JoJo about exactly what she was up to from sixteen to twenty-five. I’d have to be careful about it . . . she’s a Price, she’s liable to be prickly and maybe even punchy. “I didn’t know.”
“Jordan, she was a natural . . . slid into crowds and out of them so well, could take care of herself, cool under pressure. Tell her I miss her for me, yes? I can’t myself. Vega’s too overprotective of his queen! Foolish man, locking her up in a cage. It can’t hold . . . not with her.”
“I’ll do that,” I agreed.
“Good! Now, business with the vampire and no more kicking me!” the Tsar declared.
Annie B shrugged as well, like it was neither here nor there to her. “No promises if you don’t deliver posthaste, Igor.”
“What am I, a fuckin’ postman? I know what I know, time has no affect on what I know,” the Tsar complained.
“Six shells were stolen from the Great Bank,” Annie B informed him.
“Fuck me, what a score!”
“We’d like them back quickly.”
“I’ve heard nothing of bodies—”
“My foot begins to itch . . .”
“But I’ve heard about an auction to run for a week starting tomorrow night, invites sent to all the usual big moneyed parties.”
Annie B squinted. “Who’s running it?”
“A mysterious party . . . so likely someone who doesn’t want to share with their boss or a new player announcing his début. They claim items suited for all, from artifacts to Slush lots to bodies, all matter of stolen goods.” The Tsar went to his desk, rummaged around for a bit, pulled out a pair of panties, threw them out, rummaged around a bit more, and finally returned with an invitation. A silver disk, real silver, pressed thin—with time, place, and a bit about coming unarmed or else.
The Foul Mouth and the Headless Hunny (The King Henry Tapes) Page 20