Something clanged across the warehouse, over by the sample podiums.
Everyone turned . . .
I blinked, noticing a particularly heavy bit of shadow clinging mysteriously by a wall.
Eva just gave me the distraction I needed to save my life.
[CLICK]
This entire bit of crazy had been so slow up to this point.
No peaks and valleys.
Just a steady sinister rise.
Big stakes, but slow.
My life?
Yeah, my life was on the line through all of that talking to the Divines.
More than my life.
Know what I know today . . .
King Henry Price dies in Divine Chamber and billions of lives change.
Yeah, billions.
That big of a fuck up incoming one day.
Would it have been better without me?
Don’t know.
For some . . . they’d still be breathing, so yeah.
Some people I care about a lot more than I do my own mortal coil would still be alive.
But a better world? A more honest world?
Nah.
Don’t think so.
So the stakes have been high, high as they can be.
But it was slow.
An unfolding calamity of revelations about the world as it is. Divines. Ceinwyn. Annie B. Banks and stables and auctions.
But Fate can only take so much persistent, unyielding tension.
Eventually . . . something has to give.
Eventually . . . the earth has to quake.
Eventually . . . you have to say ‘no more.’
[CLICK]
I wasn’t as close as the guards to the clanging noise, but I knew the sound.
A dropped anima vial.
I know the sound cuz I’ve only done it once in my life.
It only takes once or you won’t live to see twenty-five.
Anima burns ain’t fun, people.
Dumbass Were guard went up to the thing like he was some character out of a video game made to get killed by guys hiding in cardboard boxes. What’s that noise! Better go check it out!
Anima escaped from the vial, invisible to everyone in the room, even me. I felt it, but couldn’t pinpoint it. I ain’t got Vicky Welf’s eyes, just a monocle, and the monocle would reveal nothing new about the situation, so I wasn’t risking my life to reach for the thing just to satisfy my immediate curiosity.
“Move!” Hector Vega yelled.
Annie B moved faster than anyone else, faster even than my desperate dive to knock her to the ground with me.
She turned and slammed her fist into Overcoat’s throat. His neck, werecoyote’s extra protection against physical attacks or not, snapped forward at a right angle.
Alive.
Blink.
Dead.
She hit him so hard with her fist that knuckle bones broke through her own skin, covered only by gooey vampire blood. The blood shifted into a spike.
I accidentally saved Tatter’s life.
I tackled Annie B just as she took a swing at his eye. It bore the both of us to the ground before her spike could connect with his eye and his brain and all things that go squish squish.
Across the room, there was an errant gun shot.
Wide.
Close one.
Across the other side of the room, the anima vial exploded into flames wherever the pyro-anima it had carried touched. Not just anima burns. Real burns too. What a lucky guard. Guy died like a human marshmallow.
Except marshmallows don’t die screaming.
Team King Henry: 2
Team Coyote JV: 0
As Annie B and me hit the warehouse floor, my first artifact dropped to the ground beside us. A small, blackened metal sphere like all the others of that line, it’s only distinguishing mark was an engraved word across the button that activated it.
Scio.
What could shadows do, right?
Nothing.
But if you put enough shadows together then you have darkness.
And a fifteen foot sphere of darkness appearing out of nowhere?
Surprisingly useful when people are trying to shoot you.
Not that I trusted Hector’s guards to do anything but pray and spray the sphere as a whole.
Which leaves us to chance and Fate and well . . . I’ve mentioned my relationship with her enough, haven’t I?
I rolled Annie and me, my arms wrapped around her, my hand reaching for my SEM-DEW in my pocket.
Annie gasped from on top of me. “I so love it when you manhandle me like this.”
I pulled out the SEM-DEW just as the inevitable machinegun fire started up, following Hector’s furious call of, “KILL THE FUCKERS!”
Button pressed, the SEM-DEW’s web-like wall shot out of the metal ball to cover every inch of Annie B and me. Not a wall this time, just a bubble. Underneath it and in the darkness, we were safe from the bullets flying over our heads or thudding into the webbing. They hit the webbing like raindrops on a pond, a sudden bit of pressure spreading slowly outward.
Safe from bullets, yes, but there was a predator in the darkness with me. A soft, warm, inviting predator in my arms, her weight very sure of itself as she slid up my body to clamp her lips against mine.
Not my fault!
I grabbed her hair to yank her head back. “Are you insane? Making a move while we got bullets whizzing over our heads? Even I have limits on where I’ll fuck at!”
POP. POP. POP.
I could barely hear myself in the gunfire, but I didn’t have any trouble hearing Annie B as she pressed into me, her tongue tracing the rim of my ear. “Not insane at all, only a vampire who knows what she wants, when she wants it, and what better time and place than in an unseen cocoon where your little blond princess will never know of it, Lover Boy?”
My whole body thought: fuck yeah, that’s a great idea! Especially Prince Henry. Guy just ain’t a team player.
Probably cuz there is an ‘I’ in penis.
Always thinking about himself and his throbbing ten inches. Eight inches. Okay, okay, like six and half.
. . . What?
Every guy measures . . . and if he says he hasn’t, he’s a fucking liar.
My hands found her shoulders to push her a couple inches away. “Still not out of this yet,” I managed to breathe under the strain. When Annie B wanted to be somewhere it was hard to move her, especially without any leverage.
She smelled my neck. “If only I did have fangs . . . look at how those bullets have gotten your heart-rate flying.”
Said bullets still snapped over our heads.
POP. POP. POP.
Talk about trusting your own product.
“Annie, I’ll throw you out of this webbing if you don’t behave,” I grunted like a guy pushing away a boulder—a really soft, curvy boulder . . . with breasts.
“Stop firing, you stupid putas!” Tatter ordered, footsteps in the sudden silence indicating he had not only survived Annie B’s blood spike, but had also survived the crossfire.
“Like the toy by the way?” I couldn’t help but ask as I leveraged my arm between us for an extra few inches of space.
“Very useful, but then you’ve always been that, haven’t you?” Annie B teased while running a hand up my pant leg to make her point very clear.
“This is no time to be playing with me!” I complained some more.
“Too true,” she whined from above, “I suppose I’ll have to settle for killing them all and torturing the information I need out of Hector Vega.”
Someone started firing again, a pistol this time. “You fucking cowards!” Hector Vega screamed to accompany the gunfire, so I took it to be him. When his magazine was empty, it dropped to the wooden stage. Thud. “And you fucking idiots! All you did was shoot your fucking selves! What am I paying you for?”
There were moans and pleas for help.
“Now do you understand why I wasn’t very w
orried about them, Lover Boy?” Annie B asked in the darkness.
“Only Eva gets to call me that.”
“Not even your little blond princess?”
“Not even her.”
“I suppose I’ll have to give you an appropriate nickname then.”
“Whatever, I’ve heard them all. And don’t think I’ll let you pretend that it was werecoyote incompetence and not my brilliant strategic mind that created this situation,” I rebutted.
Annie B snorted in contempt. “They aren’t even the best of the Coyote Nation, they’re third or fourth stringers. Cast offs, jokes. But take all the credit you feel you need to inflate your delicate esteem, Beef Cake.”
“No, just no, Fanged Lady.”
“So many nicknames for me, but none for you . . . what did they call you at school?”
“Foul Mouth.”
She chuckled, “Fitting. I suppose I could call you Shit for Brains.”
“Shit for Brains? Fifteen guys with guns completely surrounding us and we’re lying here having a pithy conversation while they’re holding their cocks in their hands. Me, all me, admit I’m a badass already.”
Team King Henry: 4-6 (estimated)
Team Coyote Super Awesome Tough Guys, Trust Us: 0
“I do like your ass . . .” she admitted. “Maybe Sweet Buns?”
“Kill me now.”
“How long will this darkness hold?”
“Another minute or two.”
“Not even time for a quickie,” she complained.
“Nope . . . which was not happening anyway.”
Team Coyote had their own conversation over ours. “You think we hit them?”
“We had to hit them!”
“They’re fucking dead, man!”
“So’s Nate and Javier!”
“Where’d that fire bomb come from?”
“Fuck if I know! He’s an Artificer, you’ve heard about him! We shouldn’t have messed with him!”
“Boss,” this was Tatter, as usual the brains of the operation, mostly because he worked directly for Vega and not stupid ass Hector, “I’m gonna go backstage and get the granadas. We lob two in, problem over.”
“Is a granada what I think it is?” I asked Annie B.
“Don’t suppose this webbing is rated for explosions?” she answered.
“Um . . . I’m not sure.”
“Ah, then I think it’s time for me to finish this and prove to you how unthreatening these pups are.”
“You go do that.”
“There are three still alive that are scattered among the sample podiums and six more to the other side, plus Mr. Vega in front of us; I’ll take the bigger half, shall I?”
“Sure—”
She grabbed my tuxedo and pulled us to standing in one movement, ripping right through the SEM-DEW’s webs. Damn it. Those things are like packing a parachute as is and ripped I’d have to start from scratch. I’d have sighed, but I was too pumped up for the coming fight.
Three werecoyotes.
I could handle three werecoyotes. Guns or no guns.
Didn’t even have to pay me a bonus.
Annie B pushed me in the right direction and out I came from the artificial darkness, not running fast but heavy, just like always. My head instantly hurt as my eyes tried to adjust to the sudden light, but I pushed on, tears flowing.
Gunfire and screams echoed out from the other side of the warehouse.
The three guys among the podiums noticed me, reloaded machineguns pointing my way as I barreled at them.
Three guns? This shit is becoming routine! Three guns? That’s all you got for me when I just handled fifteen of them?
I split my pool four ways, sending three of the geo-anima blasts into the guns like usual. I heard the same cracks, that joyous sound of success. Some of the pool escaped to find spare bits of metal or stone in the floor, but not nearly as much as there used to be. I’ve been practicing and it was paying off.
Routine.
Crazy becoming routine.
I keep surviving and it keeps growing.
What’s next?
The fourth part of the pool I tried to hold back.
Not a glowing success.
I don’t know how Paine does it.
It fucking hurts.
Like childbirth.
No joke. Hurts worse than getting kicked in the nuts, that’s for sure. I screamed at the pain, trying to keep the anima inside me as I charged in at the closest guy. What was left of my pool leaked away with every step. Like a sloshing bucket. Get the right rhythm to the sloshing and the water just starts going all over the place like it has a mind of its own.
Five-minute-pool.
Four-minute-pool.
Three-minute-pool.
Two-minute-pool.
I just barely kept enough to throw an iron fist at the first werecoyote and knock him out cold.
Then I stumbled to the ground, barely able to breathe—not a single scratch on me, but hurting bad.
The strategic brilliance of King Henry Price, Lover Boy, Foul Mouth, Shit for Brains, Sweet Buns, ladies and gentlemen!
Least she don’t know Sally used to call me Kingy, some weird, detached part of my brain spit out through the pain.
Eva saved me from getting what was left of a machinegun barrel in the face.
Women in my life . . . always saving me.
It ain’t fair.
First Val, now Eva.
Who will save me next?
Eva didn’t play fair. She popped out of her shadow, ran up behind the guy, and scio-bladed him in the neck. Brutal stuff. The guy just went limp. Women, saving me and always killing around me. Just BLAM, dead bodies and piles of ash all around.
That’s okay; I was about to join the party.
No moral high ground for King Henry Price.
My brain started to work as the pain receded, I pooled back up. I looked for the third guard, thinking maybe a SDR shock would do the trick. Left. Right. No one else in the sample podiums but me and Eva. She looked excited. Just another adventure with King Henry. Third guy, Annie B said three guys . . .
I didn’t notice him until he was all the way to the door, tail between his legs. He ran away from me.
From me? Hah.
Ran away cuz he saw what Annie B did to his friends.
Ain’t describing what the guard and I saw in detail.
Deal with it.
Words like horror and crimson would get used. I’ll describe Annie B instead. She had bullet holes all over her dress, blood spikes sticking from them. She’d formed some kind of spiked knuckles on her broken hand too. Not one of those guards on that side of the warehouse was still breathing. Most of them weren’t even in one piece. She’d obliterated them. She looked . . . alive. Sated. Magnificent.
A queen of blood and war and death.
A snarl from the auction stage drew my eyes away from the massacre.
Hector Vega’s temper finally won. He Shifted. Man into coyote in front of my eyes, clothes falling around him as two legs became four. Back during my first run in with the Coyotes I explained a bit about Were Nations to you. Totems, Shifting once a month, thirteen animal sacrifices, animas linked and all that.
The process itself is actually instantaneous, some Kirk and Spock in the transporter type shit. One second you have a human with coyote anima as a protective coating, then you got a big ass coyote with human anima enforcing its will.
POP.
Quick as all them machinegun shots.
You put all thirteen types of anima together and weird shit starts to happen. The Guild has rules about how many anima types any artifact they make can have; me, I’ve yet to experiment in that direction. But yeah, you put thirteen anima types together and out comes the science and precision of anima and in comes the magic and chaos.
Kind of like inbreeding.
Only instead of a cleft palate, with Totems you get instantaneous matter conversion.
Man becomes
werecoyote.
Werecoyote charges across the room at King Henry Price.
I wasn’t scared.
If anything, I wanted to laugh at him.
Who the fuck is scared of a coyote, even a werecoyote with a human mind? I got thumbs, puta! Sure, people get scared that a dog might bite them, but kill them? And sure, occasionally some pack of abused pitbulls might get loose and kill an old lady looking for teapots or something, but newsflash: guess what a pack of abused humans can manage?
Whole lot more.
Some Were Nations get their power from what they Shift into. Jaguars? Grizzlies? Okay, big ass bear runs after me and I’ll be rightly impressed. But the Coyotes? The Coyote Nation’s power has never been about their animal side of the equation. It’s been about numbers and a community of ten-thousand looking out for each other. About ruthlessness and aggression without a care for the law. About a willingness to do whatever it takes to build power and influence and protect your turf.
Coyotes are scavengers at heart, just like humans.
Taking out the smallest, the weakest, being smart and tricky and overwhelming.
Hector Vega charging at me as a werecoyote wasn’t scary.
It was stupid.
It got him killed.
I pool faster now. Don’t know why, don’t know how long it will last, but it’s a fact. An iron fist comes really easy these days. All this training and experimentation, all the artifacts I’ve built and all the new conjurations I practiced after my run in with Paine . . . iron fist is still my fall back. Over ten years of reaction built into my body.
Punch.
Release anima.
Knocked out bully.
If they’re human.
Not if they’re a coyote.
Dead bully.
Hector Vega’s skull popped as I dodged to the left and threw down my fist into his canine head. He crumbled. A burst of anima from the body and he was a human again. Were anima escapes the first second you don’t have control of it.
All about control.
Don’t have control and you’re nothing.
You’re worse than nothing.
You’re Hector Vega.
Naked human.
Dead human.
Bleeding from his ears.
Didn’t mean to do it.
But I did it.
I killed him.
I killed Zoey’s husband.
I killed Horatio Vega’s nephew.
I stared down at the body, at my unblemished fist.
The Foul Mouth and the Headless Hunny (The King Henry Tapes) Page 26