With a sigh, I punched him in the face.
He spewed some threats, but at least they were in English, “Gonna rip you to pieces. I was supposed to protect him! It was my job!”
“Yeah, I know. Bet you were the only one to tell him buying the bodies was a bad idea, huh?”
Tatter glared through blue Slush tinted pink with blood. He saw the trap and resisted being dragged in.
“Right, we both know what I’m doing,” I told him, “but here’s the thing: I made a deal with the baroness over there. You tell me where the shells are and you get to live.”
His eyes doubted every word. “Why would you do that?”
“It was an accident and Vega needs to hear that,” I repeated the reasoning I’d given Annie B. But mostly I just wanted one of them to survive this. Just one. “Not like I’m gonna lie to him, I’m gonna tell him exactly what happened, but it will help having someone backing me up.”
Tatter breathed through his mouth, nose still broken despite the Slush. Skin knits quickly, but bone takes a long time. It hurts a shitload more too. “He’ll kill you.”
“Maybe. That’s for another day though. This is just you, me, and the vampire after her shells.”
“He’ll kill me too.”
“Maybe I tell him you were the only smart guy in the bunch, starting with how you didn’t want to buy the shells in the first place,” I returned the conversation back to its start.
Tatter’s gaze went to the ceiling.
Good.
“Too hot, I told him,” Tatter muttered, “But he saw billions on top of all the shit we already had. Would’ve set him up as a new king, Rey de Los Angeles. Not a king of a Nation, but a king of outlaws and renegades from all the rest. A place for all the outcasts to go and him on the top, sitting on a throne.”
“A necromancer sold the shells to you?”
“Nah, one of their puppets did all the dealing.”
A Construct that talks?
“Ten million for all them bodies,” Tatter whispered to the skylights. “Knew it was trouble, but all Hector saw was billions in returned investment. Only had to keep them a few days. Fell in our lap right when the auction was starting . . . guess that was a clue too.”
One last question for his life. “Where did you store the others?”
“Meat packing plant across the street,” Tatter said.
I nodded. “Sit in the Slush for a few minutes, then get the fuck out of here, pick up Pajamas at the hotel and get back to Vega. I can’t protect you once Annie B has what she wants.”
“Protected by King Henry Price . . . world gone to shit,” Tatter growled up at Fate.
I couldn’t disagree with him.
[CLICK]
We jogged over to the meat packing plant.
The whole area was deserted now. No sign of sports cars, limos, or a single flash of bling. Surprisingly, no cops either—a thousand gunshots or not. Maybe Annie had rigged things with them before hand, knowing she would be in the area. Wouldn’t be shocked if the LAPD police chief was a vamp. That’s their style after all.
“Can I have your phone?” Annie B asked once we were on the other side of the street.
“What’s wrong with yours?” I snarled back, just about at the end of my helpfulness for the evening.
“It has three bullets in it.”
“Guess you’ll go without.”
“Don’t make me take it from you.”
“Like you could.”
She stopped jogging to put a hand on my shoulder. “Do you even have a pool?”
“Enough to cripple you,” I threatened.
But her hand slid up to caress the side of my face instead of leveraging me into a throw or punch. “He was stupid, he deserved it.”
“Yeah, he did,” I said. “Still pissed about dealing with the aftermath though. And all this is on you and your Divine Court.”
“You agreed to work with me, you’re being paid,” she laid down some facts.
“Like I could say ‘no’ . . . and like that makes it better.”
“Come now, King Henry, it would have happened sooner or later. You know what you are. You’re a fighter and a ravager and all things ruinous. Hector Vega won’t be the last or the worst or the most deserving or the least deserving. You’re a man now, quit being a child and give me your cell-phone so I can call this in and earn both of us a significant mound of gold.”
All true. I was still pissed. Always pissed. Just something new to blame it on. The Divine Court for making me be in Los Angeles. Hector Vega for being such a fucktard.
Least I saved one guy.
Guess that would have to be enough.
I rummaged through my tuxedo jacket for my cell-phone.
Heh.
Sometimes that Fate has a good sense of humor on her.
My cell-phone was cracked in half from all that geo-anima I’d thrown out.
Annie B seethed over it. “A one hundred and fifty million dollar shell is just sitting alone in that building over there and we have no way to contact the clean up team.”
“Let’s find the other bodies and then you can beat up our limo driver for his.”
Annie B stopped, turning around. “Our limo is gone.”
I looked too. “Well . . . shit.”
[CLICK]
The meat packing factory would’ve been cold if I hadn’t been accustomed to vampire temperatures from the last couple of days on Annie B’s couch. Though I could have gone without the little pleased moan she gave when the temperature rolled over us. I’ll never get used to that.
Cold as turn on.
Cold as foreplay.
Freaky ass vampires.
“Now let us see if your furry friend was telling the truth or if I have to—” Annie B started before stopping.
The entrance was a smaller room, leading out onto the packing floor through those strips of plastic used to keep the cold air in, along with blowers up top. It wasn’t the extra level of cold hitting us that stopped Annie B’s words, but what we saw.
We stood in silence.
Just staring.
“—hunt him down,” Annie B finished at a whisper seconds later.
“We have a very serious problem,” I decided.
“I don’t understand . . .” she whispered. “What . . . I don’t understand.”
I stepped fully into the packing floor, studying body after body laid out on gurneys. Body after body of perfection or oddity, sometimes both. Row after row. One after another. I began a count.
“There are only supposed to be six!” Annie B complained, at who I’m not sure.
“Fifty-six, counting the one we already found,” I finished.
Fifty-six shells.
All prime. All Eresha quality. But only six had been missing.
Where’d the extra fifty come from?
“We have a very serious problem,” I repeated.
Fifty-six here, only six missing in the Great Bank. What’s in those fifty sarcophagi then?
Oh shit. “I fucking told you we should have checked on all of them!”
“What?” Annie B sputtered.
“Vampire plans end in death right?” I asked her, stalking back and forth down the line of shells, putting it all together. Fucking brilliant!
“What are you going on about?” Annie B complained, still not catching up.
“You steal bodies from the Great Bank, something that’s impossible right? But why? You said vampires don’t think like that, they just go for the throat, all their plans end in death. So we think this is some humans or Weres trying to get rich and that’s what the thieves want us to think too, that’s why we go on our merry chase around LA here to Hector. Cuz that buys them time . . .”
Annie B squinted at me, finally started to catch up, “But how does this end in death?”
“Bonegrinders! Don’t you get it? They didn’t walk out six bodies to make a buck. They walked out over fifty bodies and replaced a shit ton of them with Cons
tructs!” I was yelling, I couldn’t help myself. “And what does Eresha do when someone steals from her? She goes into full lockdown mode. She takes all her precious shells, with all the poisonous sarcophagi right on back to her home mansion or sanctuary or lair or whatever you call it. And then . . . but why wouldn’t they attack right off the bat at the Great Bank? They had her right there in front of us . . . why wait for her home?”
Annie B gasped.
“What?” I asked like some coked out housewife after the next hit of soap opera. “What is it?”
“We . . . I’m not supposed to tell you,” she whispered, suddenly a frightful maid, “it’s . . .”
“Come on! Are you kidding me? All the rules we’ve broken together? Ain’t I the guy that figured this out? Ain’t I the guy who got you through Joannie D and the Divine Chamber?”
She sighed, shaking her head. “It’s . . . we never stop growing. When you’re young, it’s no trouble at all to live in a shell, but when you reach a thousand years and you enter what’s considered adulthood—”
“Dukes.”
“—yes, about that age, you begin to outgrow what a human can hold,” she ended, looking embarrassed like she always did when she explained how very human she wasn’t.
“So Divines . . . ?” I led her.
“Massive. Even the youngest are over ten-thousand years old, for some it’s much more than that.”
“Then how—”
She interrupted the thought, “They have special rooms, pools a lot like the one in the Great Bank. Although . . . not a pool of water . . . and that’s where the Divine truly lives. Only a portion of themselves is allowed to enter into a shell when needed and then when it comes back . . .”
“We’ve gone over that I think ya’ll are disgusting, right?”
“Yes, King Henry, multiple times.”
I thought about all this, putting it into the equation. “So Eresha just transferred fifty Constructs to where she keeps her real body . . .”
Huntress mode returned to Annie B like a piece of clothing she physically donned. Her velvet eyes gained a glint, her hips swayed as she strutted towards the factory’s loading bay, and her lips smirked at the whole world. “It’s a lucky break that I know just where Eresha’s mansion is located.”
“Uh . . . couldn’t we just find another phone and—”
“Come along, King Henry, we have a Divine to save.”
“You wanted a phone earlier—”
“Follow or I don’t pay you, King Henry.”
[CLICK]
“You’ll get pulled over by the cops if you keep speeding like this,” I not so helpfully pointed out.
“I’m in an 18-wheeler, let them try to stop me,” Annie B snarled, taking a turn that had me clenching my butt cheeks.
“Please tell me why this is a better plan then stealing a cell-phone and calling Nii-Vah? And for fuck’s sake, stop driving like a madwoman! You almost hit that hobo!”
“Hardly the first hobo I’d have killed,” she muttered while making another turn that had me clenching my teeth along with my butt cheeks. “You called it the Great Depression, but for us it was a very good hunting season for over a decade, hardly depressing.”
“Why ain’t we calling someone who can actually handle this quicker than us and can do it without dying on the freeway?” I growled in a quick burst between my teeth.
“King Henry Price appealing to authority?” Annie B mocked me while taking a third turn that had me clenching my whole body, even my testes.
“Sorry, but the for-cash version of King Henry Price doesn’t give enough of a shit about the Divine Eresha to bother saving her personally,” I explained in simple terms. “We found the bodies. That was my job. Not fighting fifty Constructs for someone I will be happy to see dead, especially not when your boss can have a thousand goons there to protect Eresha in five fucking minutes—look out for that hybrid!”
A crunch of metal was the only answer as Annie B kept straight on down the road. I don’t know enough about Los Angeles to tell you where we were. Some place with mansions about thirty minutes from some industrial zone. Go have fun clicking around Google maps, cuz it really don’t matter, do it?
“One: unlike Nii-Vah, Eresha hasn’t adapted well to this millennium and is unlikely to have a phone for us to warn her directly. Two: Nii-Vah doesn’t know where Eresha’s mansion is, only I do, and if I told her and Eresha survived, I would be glassed for revealing the sanctuary of one Divine to another. They aren’t exactly the most trusting of each other for the very reason this situation highlights. Three: if I know a Divine is in danger and I don’t attempt to save her, I will also be glassed. So here it is, King Henry, here’s your moment to answer my question!”
“What question?”
She let out a deep breath to keep her emotions in check. “If it was me who was captured . . . would you save me? I’m captured, King Henry, I have to do this. So, do we have a real relationship with real emotions or is it all play between us? Do you have my back or will you take your million dollars and step aside?”
I thought about it for one whole second.
“Fucking God damn it to shit hell,” I growled, the cursing eventually giving up even a facade of grammar, “fuck bitch asshole douchebag cocksucking tittylicking ARGH!”
Annie B smiled. “Nice to know you care.”
I sulked as she kept driving, narrowly missing a couple of runners out way too early for their own good. Sun wasn’t even up yet. 4AM? 5AM? No clock in the truck, just a busted up radio and a healthy stack of porno mags in the camper.
“Look on the bright side: the necromancer behind the plan might be there,” Annie B pointed out, “don’t you hate one of them? A Welf I believe?”
That brightened me up a bit. Not that I expected it to be Welf. Not sure what Welf was up to—Welf Financial? Project Cassandra?—but I got my hopes up that the Curator might be him and well, that had kicked me in the balls. Doubted this was Welf either. Fifty Constructs? Could be Momma Welf . . . or Mordecai Root . . . or Jethro Smith . . .
Heh. Jethro Smith leading a Construct army. Too bad the guy was only an Intra and not a full blown Bonegrinder, he could’ve been his whole rock band that way. His old band, The Madness, broke up our last year at school. Guy moped around the Park drinking Jack straight from the bottle for four months.
But eventually he cheered up.
I helped.
Strippers were involved.
“I don’t like necromancers for this whole reason. Don’t have to do their own killing, do they? Don’t even have to do their own business. Just a nameless dead man doing the dealing and the talking.” I shook my head. “Whoever it is ain’t gonna be there. Just his tools. Just his killers.”
“He or she might come to gloat,” Annie B figured aloud, “one doesn’t often get to kill a Divine.”
That got me curious. “When did it happen last?”
“Oh . . . not since the Fall of Atlas, I imagine.”
“Right . . . the Fall of Atlas.”
Whenever that was.
A long long time ago, far far away.
Vamps knew about it, but the Asylum didn’t teach that far back. Most of modern mancer history started around the Augustus Reforms and that was only a couple thousand years old. I hate these creatures, but they have all the cheat codes . . . all the truth, or whatever they made the truth. I hate them, but here I am trying to save one of the worst.
I glanced over at Annie B. Bullet holes in her red dress, heels missing in action as she pounded the gas pedal into the floor. Dark hair wild, velvet eyes alight with purpose. Trying to save one of the worst for one of the best . . .
[CLICK]
“Front gate,” I said.
“Got it.”
“Front gate!” I yelled.
“Still got it.”
“FRONT GATE!” I screeched like a little girl.
Annie B plowed through the damn gate, all three inches of reinforced steel. The 18-w
heeler had so much speed going that it barely even noticed. But I noticed. My seatbelt noticed as I flopped forward, backward, then forward again, the air blasted from my lungs and stomach both.
If all the smashed hybrids, dead hobos, and wrecked street signs didn’t wake up the neighborhood, then this collision would. BLAM. CLANG. POW. All them good comic book words rolled into one action of steel meeting steel. One piece stationary, the other with tons of force and more than enough horsepower to spare.
BLAM.
CLANG.
POW.
Go get ‘em Adam West.
Then we were through, nothing but an expanse of grass and driveway directly in front of us, a mansion in the near distance—one of those huge block mansions with all the little rooms inside that has you wondering about the human race’s taste in living quarters . . . though in this case it wasn’t a human at home. Just a huge sentient pool of blood with shells at the ready to live in for the day.
Vamps never stop getting more disgusting.
They just don’t.
More you find out about them, the more you want to stomp them off the planet.
Stables. Handmaidens. Sucking out memories. Overgrowing their shells.
It doesn’t stop.
One depravity after another and not the fun kind of depravity that involves va-jay-jays and enough honey to put you into a diabetic coma.
Annie B finally hit the brakes, stopping us in a slide that only ended right on top of the mansion’s front door.
“Give me a sec, I need to reattach my balls,” I muttered through a woozy vision and slurred lips, sure signs my brain was just a tad rattled in the crash.
Someone opened up the front door.
Sixteen-year-old girl with an E on her forehead. Handmaiden. Least we’re in the right place. Least she has clothes on this time so I’m not looking around to beat up Pedobear before he can attack the poor thing.
No bears to fear, pedo nor grizzly, just Constructs.
Fifty time-bombs sitting inside that house.
Hard to kill a Construct I’ve been told.
Have to cut them or mash them into pieces. Damn things could be nothing but a body and legs and they’d be running around kicking at shins like the Black Knight. ‘Tis a flesh wound alright. Flesh that’s dead, powered only by lines of carefully crafted necro-anima. Better to think of them as meat puppets than a human. Not a whole lot of weapons to use against them in my arsenal. SDR and my anima. Thirty-minute-pool this time, built up on the ride over to the place.
The Foul Mouth and the Headless Hunny (The King Henry Tapes) Page 29