If only I could hold onto it and dole it out a piece at a time . . .
But I couldn’t.
Too much pain.
Hadn’t learned the trick.
Or my mind wasn’t broken enough for it.
Not sure.
I’m here, I’ll fight, but I ain’t dying for no Divine. Annie B thought she’d won some equal footing with Val due to me fighting for her, but there’s a difference between the two. I’d fight for Annie B, but I’d die for Val. Not dying for you, Fanged Lady.
But I’d fight . . . why not?
I love to fight.
Too bad Constructs ain’t human enough to go down to punching.
Might have really had some fun then.
Somehow I got my tight as hell seatbelt off me and opened the door of the truck, sliding down the side to the pavement. Eresha’s handmaiden was all big eyes and gasping mouth. “You can’t be here!” she told us. “This is her private dwelling! No one but those of my order can walk in the walls of her sanctuary!”
Not sure why I expected Annie B to reason with the girl. Probably because she was a girl. Not an adult to human eyes. But to vampire eyes she was just another human. Annie B grabbed the handmaiden by the neck and hauled her up so she was on precarious tippy-toes. “Nod or shake your head, no in-between or I squeeze,” she ordered in full-on baroness-mode.
The handmaiden nodded.
“Good girl,” Annie B told her. “Is the Divine in residence?”
A nod.
“Have the shells arrived from the Great Bank?”
Another nod.
“Okay, dear, you’re doing very good—”
Two more handmaidens appeared in the door. Also clothed. Small victories against the weird! Also armed with handguns. Handmaidens with handguns . . . that’s a good one, Fate, ain’t you fucking clever.
“Baroness,” one of them ordered, “please release Clarisse.”
Annie B didn’t release Clarisse. “The Divine is in danger,” she told them instead.
“The Divine is surrounded by our faithful order,” the third handmaiden rebutted, “and she wears her Warrior Shell—she couldn’t be more protected. You forget yourself, Baroness Boleyn. This is not a duke you work for, but a Divine. Finding her property does not grant you access to these halls. Release Clarisse or we will shoot you through her.”
Clarisse nodded, ready to die for her god and preparing for the afterlife.
“Hey now, how about we all calm down?” I said. “All on the same side, right?”
All three handmaidens sneered at me. “Filthy anima-infused,” one whispered like it explained everything.
Teenage girls sneering at me, why is this familiar? Oh yeah, my entire life from ten to twenty. “We’re here to tell your Divine something she needs to know,” I reasoned with her, happy the guns weren’t on me for once. “No reason for Clarisse to die over that, is there? I know you must not get many visitors—especially ones that ram the front gate down—but something way more dangerous than Annie B or me could wake up at any moment and it’s already inside of the house.”
“Preposterous,” one of the handmaidens said, but the other looked doubtful.
Annie B still hadn’t released Clarisse.
If I get killed by a trio of teenage girls before I get killed by a mob of rampaging Constructs, I’m gonna be really pissed off about it. “We found the shells,” I told them, using the same calm voice I used on JoJo when she was a moody teenager.
“The Divine will be pleased,” Doubtful said.
“This fact doesn’t give you reason to be here,” Preposterous claimed, gun finger still itching.
“We found fifty-six shells,” I added, “not just the six we were looking for. A necromancer or a group of necromancers is behind this . . . do the math.”
Doubtful had very wide eyes. “But . . . we . . .”
Preposterous gasped, running back the way they’d come from inside the mansion.
Annie B tossed Clarisse aside into a bush. “Reason, can’t say I approve of it.”
[CLICK]
We charged after a screaming Preposterous, leaving Doubtful to help her fellow handmaiden. Room after room. Library, living room, bedroom, bedroom, bathroom, kitchen, eating room. Massive by comparison against your average house. The square footage on the mansion was impressive.
“Eresha, my Divine, my Divine!” went the screams and we ran after.
I saw more handmaidens.
These had on little white dresses that looked somewhat like the toga dress Eresha had worn to the Divine Chamber. Perhaps they only went unclothed in the bank vault or in Eresha’s lair or in her presence or something. Lair, fucking vampires having lairs in the 21st century! Just more bullshit.
I put the oldest handmaidens at seventeen and the youngest all the way down at seven or eight. No adults. I didn’t want to think about what she did with them once they were adults. Not dying for Eresha, ain’t doing it. Doing just enough to get Annie B out of this alive without being glassed afterwards. That’s it, I furiously decided.
Ain’t a hero, King Henry Price. Annie B been telling you that all week. Hector Vega’s corpse proves it true. No time to try to change your ways.
Had to be 5AM, maybe heading towards 6AM.
About the time a vampire starts thinking about watching some TV and getting ready for bed. What other time would you attack? What other time is their guard more down? A long couple days moving almost four-hundred bodies from the Great Bank to this mansion. Not that day, not when they’re sleeping. You’ll have a second of surprise, but then they’ll get that rush. But if you attack when they’re tired, when their mind is elsewhere . . .
Preposterous ran through a pair of double doors exactly like those of Eresha’s private vault at the Great Bank. The room beyond was the duplicate as well, but where the colors then had been white and blue, here it was black and red. Black marble. A massive walk-down pool of gurgling, slimy blood, thick and congealed and crimson and . . . that ain’t blood.
It was cold, always cold with vampires.
But the blood . . . but the real Eresha . . . the air steamed above her.
The only difference from the private vault was a bedroom set up along one wall, except with no walls. A huge four-post bed, a table for cards and games surrounded by chairs, dresser after dresser filled with clothes, shoe stands, and everything you’d need to keep a vampire in fashion for a week or so. The handmaidens probably worked overtime to make sure it was in stock with the correct sizes for all the shells.
The shelled part of Eresha was present, in the warrior shell from the private vault too, big huge hunk of a man with thick blond hair. Only no suit this time, naked as can be. Muscle after muscle. Eresha was banging the shit out of a pair of handmaidens with a cock that would’ve made Meal proud. Thin strands of blood exited the shell to slide roughly into the handmaidens at the wrists and feet.
Could’ve died without ever seeing that.
“My Divine!” Preposterous screamed, dropping her gun at the edge of the room. Probably a safety rule, some detached part of me thought as I followed behind her and Annie B. “My Divine!”
You could barely hear her calls over all the noise from the bed, but Eresha stopped her thrusting when she spotted Annie B and me. The warrior shell’s face grew dark in anger. That’s fair, you interrupted me grunting and humping a pair of nubile teenagers I’d be pretty pissed off too. Especially if I had to slide all my blood tentacles out of them and . . . oh fuck this shit.
Burn it.
Game over, man.
Nuke it from orbit.
Eresha climbed down from the bed, towering over everyone else in the room. Plenty intimidating and not just because of the pulsating pool of blood a few yards away from her. Or the gigantic horse cock hanging to her knee. “You risk your life by walking these walls, Baroness Boleyn.”
“Wrong, I attempt to save your life by walking them,” Annie B corrected.
“My Divine, my
Divine!” Preposterous whimpered, frantic.
“Calm, my child,” Eresha soothed, patting the handmaiden on the head. “The baroness and her pet can bring no harm to you in my presence.”
“My Divine, they say the sarcophagi we brought here are filled with Constructs!” Preposterous pleaded with her god.
An expression of confusion came over Eresha’s rough warrior face. “Constructs?” she asked.
Fifty sarcophagi clicked from blue to red in an instant, their doors slowly sliding open. Or maybe you’re a real cocky son-of-a-bitch, I thought, and maybe it’s not the time you’re thinking about, maybe it’s the moment. Maybe you rig up the killing machines so they only activate when Eresha says the magic word.
Maybe you want her to know her doom is upon her before she dies.
Constructs.
Click times fifty.
And out they came. Not the human-like Constructs considered the high art form of Bonegrinders, but Constructs created for battle, thick with lines of necro-anima running over their skin, bristling with grafted armor and weapons—spikes, blades, and plates oh my. Some hopped down from a height of two stories, others scurried out and along the curved walls of the lair like spiders with joints spun backwards.
“Every handmaiden get out of the room now!” I yelled.
King Henry Price, always trying to turn back time and protect his lost sisters.
Preposterous shook her head in denial, but at Eresha’s nod, relented, dragging her two compatriots past Annie B and me at the only entrance to the lair. Big, wide entrance, ain’t that the vampire way? All the while as the three girls stumbled and jogged on by, Constructs continued to appear one by one, circling Eresha as the Divine calmly walked towards the pool of blood at the center.
“Are you behind those faces, Sister?” Eresha asked, strangely detached for someone so surrounded. “Did your favorite necromancer plot this for you? Do you grin behind his shoulder as he commands this army?”
More and more Constructs.
Until all fifty stood on the same ground as the rest of us.
“What exactly are we supposed to do?” I whispered a question at Annie B.
She took out her gun and a single knife for answer. “Whatever we can, King Henry.”
“You really gonna die for her? It’s not even Nii-Vah, not even one of ‘em you like!”
“She’s a Divine,” Annie B said, like that explained it all.
“We’re gonna get cut to pieces if we step in there!” I growled.
“She’s a Divine and she’s surrounded and if I take even a few with me that could be enough to save her life,” Annie B said as she turned to me. “If I die and you survive . . . there’s something in my will for you. I hope you enjoy it . . . I know I have.”
She locked a surprise kiss on me, so forceful that it could’ve sucked my intestines out if it had lasted longer than the five passionate seconds it did. “Good luck, my king,” she told me.
Woman always has to play the hero going off to war . . . and damned if it doesn’t work on me each time. I thought back to another large room a year ago, another vampire surrounded. Annie B, always the Loyal Whore.
The Constructs didn’t even consider us a threat. All one-hundred eyes were on Eresha, in a ring, single-file around the outside of the room, only a small gap opening between the door and the center of the room.
Eresha could’ve run for us, might have even made it, but instead she stood next to the pool. Her true body. That mass of blood. More blood than can fit in a human shell. More blood than can fit in a hundred shells, two-hundred shells. Who knew how deep that pool went? It was a mass of gooey redness, becoming more and more agitated as the piece of Eresha in the shell drew closer and closer.
“Is it you, Sister?” Eresha asked. “Or is it one of the others? Pwent? Jealous of my Great Bank to the last? Father? Cleaning up your mess after all these thousands of years? Or is it you, Nii-Vah? Finally making right your suspicions about Dale’s sudden accident? No, it’s you, Inanina, it’s always you. You haven’t tried to kill me in five-hundred years, but it’s always you.
“Jealous of my beauty, jealous of father’s love, jealous of how I adore my humans and how my humans prosper as your kind remains forever in the dust. Well played on this attempt, Sister. It might have been enough if I’d been caught unaware. But you had to drag this show out, didn’t you? You always played with your prey too long . . . they always turned on you, hated you by the time you took their lives. But not mine, they loved me to the last drop.
“It will be love that saves me, Sister. Look at them, those two in the doorway. Your spawn and her toy, such strong chains she’s wrapped around him and he can’t even see them. But we see them; we know, do we not? She’ll fight for me and he’ll fight for her and that will be just enough for our little feud to continue on into the next millennia, won’t it?”
Fuck this.
Couldn’t go down like this.
But it did go down like that.
At first it went down exactly like that. Exactly as Eresha expected it to.
Fifty Constructs charged her shell.
I won’t even pretend to be able to accurately describe the flurry of movement. Know I stood there fingering my SDR. Know Annie B fired off twelve shots from her little holdout gun, dropped it, picked up the weapon the handmaiden had left behind, and fired off fifteen more. Constructs didn’t care, didn’t bother to change their course through it all.
She managed to kneecap a few, slow them down some, but on they flowed, black-lines on pallid skin, meshed together with weapons of a more brutal age that humanity left behind a long time ago. Knives, swords, maces, axe heads. Medieval. Dark Ages. Stone Ages. Back to the core of a caveman bashing another caveman over the head with a rock.
Body on body.
Fifty bodies against one shell.
Eresha’s warrior shell destroyed the first four Constructs. Arms and legs ripped off, heads smashed to pulp, hands through chests. The blood in her body appeared in a flurry of spikes and swords and axe heads of her own. She destroyed four Constructs, necro-anima leaking out from the bodies and pooling around them as dark pools.
Annie B made to dart forward, but I grabbed her around the middle, hauled her backwards. She fought me. I pulled again. I couldn’t let anyone get in the middle of that. A grinder of meat and flesh and blood. Slashing and bashing and spurts and splashes and so fast you only saw outlines.
“Don’t,” I whispered, as overwhelmed by the moment as I had been standing in Meteyos’ prison. But there I’d known I was safe and here in Eresha’s lair I’d never felt more vulnerable. “Don’t, Annie, please don’t.”
Annie B fought me, but she didn’t pull away. We both knew she could have if she really wanted to. We both knew this wasn’t an act of love like Eresha thought, but an act of duty, duty to a disloyal god.
Love wouldn’t save Eresha that morning.
Love kept Annie B from dying.
Or at least sympathy.
Or whatever I felt for her.
Wasn’t love, wasn’t like with Val, wouldn’t hurt Val to be with Annie B—but damn it, I did like her warts and all, even if she occasionally ate on me and put me in situations where I killed people. She was the bad girl, the girl with the velvet eyes, she wasn’t supposed to be easy and I wasn’t going to let her die easily.
Not like she would have in that mess.
Eresha destroyed four Constructs before they ripped her shell to pieces. Just . . . tore apart like a pack of six-year-olds at wrapping paper on Christmas morning. Can you hear that sound? Can you hear that crinkling and tearing? Now imagine the present squirts blood. Imagine the second that blood is out in the open, it forms itself into some snake-like creature and slithers right into that big pool of gooey vampire.
Imagine seeing all the still working Constructs rushing backwards to gain space from that pool.
Imagine that pool erupting, forming itself a new body, a massive body. That lair took up fou
r stories and half the mansion and Eresha’s true self was tall enough to take up more than half that space. She could have formed her blood body into anything, I suppose. But she attempted to perfect humanity in her shells, so of course she would choose a human shape with two arms and two legs, a head and a womanly chest and . . . it was all there, all made out of blood.
Except no eyes or skin or . . . as I said: all blood. Hard blood, crystal blood with edges to cut one moment and then the elasticity of a bungie cord in the next. It was all wrong. All . . . monstrous. Out of her back came strips that could have been wings if they connected together, but were instead twelve whip-like appendages ending in sword points. These ‘wings’ wrapped around Eresha like a cocoon, feeling the air, sensing for her pray.
God.
I know we don’t talk much.
I don’t even know if you’re actually a thing. I’ve met gods, but never the full on capitalization job that churchy types do for you. Mancy kind of takes out all the miracles in your little book too, so . . . ya know, no hard feelings, but I ain’t that impressed. But on the off chance that you do really exist, I got a deal for you.
If you get me out of this one then I promise I will never make another Japanese tentacle porn joke in my lifetime.
Promise.
Please?
“So beautiful,” Annie B whispered exactly the opposite reaction of what I was having.
The Constructs attacked yet again.
Red against black and white. A giant monster versus many small monsters.
Constructs were thrown around, speared by blood, smashed into walls. Eresha got cut and cut and cut again, not gooey vampire but real blood splattering wherever the Constructs struck. At first it was all chaos, disorganized, the same frenzy as before, but then a dance emerged among the Constructs, like a maestro took the reins of the orchestra or some brilliant commander appeared behind an army.
The Foul Mouth and the Headless Hunny (The King Henry Tapes) Page 30