Root kneeled down like a supplicant to the vampires . . . exactly as Annie B had in the Divine Chamber.
“No titty nipple way,” T-Bone whispered.
It was worse for him. For me, Root was just a guy around the place, a guy who hated me for showing him up a few times. But he was T-Bone’s Survival and Defense and Elementalism as a Weapon teacher. It was like finding out your chemistry teacher was a meth kingpin.
“Why would he do it?” T-Bone asked.
I stared at the small man in the monitor screen. Ceinwyn had Nii-Vah. Now Root had Inanina. The future of the Asylum was being fought not only at the school, but in the Divine Court. I didn’t like the idea, didn’t like how it made me wonder who was really in charge of everything. It made all the other questions I had, everything about Paine and Meteyos and now Root and . . . what the fuck was a Maximus?
How much are you hiding from me, Ceinwyn?
I had to ask her. I had to take this tape and play it to her and ask her to be honest with me and if she wasn’t honest . . . if she lied or if she denied or if she tried to convince me to do the civilized thing . . .
“You okay?” T-Bone asked.
I managed to nod. “We got what we came for.”
“Right, just give me an hour to pull out all equipment and then—”
The hotel door burst open with the force of a battering ram.
Or a vampire’s foot.
[CLICK]
“I hear we have some naughty boys—”
The mocking entrance died on Annie B’s lips when she saw it was me inside the room. “You stupid son-of-a-bitch,” she said instead, eyes wide in disbelief. “You bloody stupid cunt!”
“Now, now, Annie, we’ve had a conversation about that word before—”
She slammed the door shut so hard it fell off the hinges. “You’re spying on Nii-Vah? What are you thinking?” she hissed at me. “What idiotic fairy flew up your ass and took over your brain?”
“Can fairies do that?” I asked T-Bone.
T-Bone couldn’t look away from Annie B.
She’d changed since I saw her last. Had on her huntress gear, all jeans and dark colors, gun and knives visible. No jewelry beside her B choker. Her posture said she was either going to rip us in half or give us a spanking.
“I’m being remiss in my manners!” I exclaimed theatrically, “T-Bone, this is Annie B, my vampire ex-fuck-buddy. Annie B, this is T-Bone, my business associate and reluctant friend.”
“Pleased to meet you,” T-Bone mumbled, manners getting the better of him.
“T-Bone is an electromancer, he can shoot lightning bolts,” I warned Annie B. “So maybe we should talk instead of you doing your usual greeting.”
Annie B studied me for a minute.
A minute of silence between us.
I saw the war in her. Duty and . . . doubt it was love, but some kind of affection for me. “Why do this? Why not go home with your money? Why not find your little blond princess and forget about Inanina?”
“I had to prove she was a bully,” I said, going all the way down to my core.
“Nii-Vah proved she was a bully. Nii-Vah made a deal with Pwent. Nii-Vah will force concessions out of Inanina one day when she tries to start a war with your kind. Nii-Vah, not King Henry Price. You’re just the bloodsucker in this situation.”
I gave her my best smirk. “About time you knew how it felt, ain’t it?”
Getting nowhere with me, she turned to T-Bone. “Have you made copies yet? Have you sent the files anywhere over the internet?”
“It’s copying to that flashdrive right now,” T-Bone said.
We’d have to work on his keeping secret skills. If I could do it then he needed to do it too. “You try to shoot that computer and we’re gonna have a problem,” I warned Annie B.
“You know,” she told me, “isn’t that enough?”
“Would be most days . . . but I need to know some other stuff and I need that flashdrive to find it out.”
Annie B smiled at me, but it was cold. “Ceinwyn.”
“Yup.”
“She’ll disappoint you, I think.”
“Better I find out now than when I need her to have my back against the monsters.”
She tried with T-Bone again. “You’re in a lot of trouble, Stormcaller Bonnie.”
“I’m with King Henry. Of course I’m in a lot of trouble,” he gave the facts of life.
“No one needs to know it was the two of you,” Annie B tried to make a deal, “I’ll destroy the computers, burn the room. Have you thought about what you’ve done? You’ve just spied on the Divine Court. Worse, you spied using the spy of the Divine Court. If you two tell anyone about this, show anyone that footage—then you’re hurting her. Inanina’s enemy, Ceinwyn’s mentor, humanity’s greatest friend? Is that who you want to harm? No one will care Inanina killed Eresha, but they’ll care that Nii-Vah allowed a pair of anima-infused children to spy on us.”
“She’s making sense, King Henry,” T-Bone admitted.
“Yeah, she is,” I admitted too. Perhaps I hadn’t thought things all the way through. The rush to war is like that. So much excitement in the moment, then thousands are dead and you’re digging graves and you’re asking yourself why you’re such a fucktard. Maybe I had a tiny bit of peace still in me. Maybe I could bear that, for Annie B. “Let me walk out with a single flashdrive to give to Ceinwyn and you can destroy the rest.”
Annie B shook her head at me, face getting sad. “Don’t make me do this to you.”
“Come on, Annie, you even know what’s on it? Even know who the necromancer turned out to be?”
“I’m not supposed to know. No one is supposed to know,” she whispered. “There are secrets to be kept so the world keeps spinning. Nii-Vah is showing trust in you even living with the information, King Henry, can’t you see that? I can’t let you leave with evidence of it.”
“Secrets to be kept,” I laughed, dark and slow, “like Meteyos being a dragon? Like the Geo Realm and the Sawaephim? Like what a World-Breaker can really do, Annie?”
Her face was so white that it was the first time in my presence she actually looked like a blood creature wearing a dead body. “You . . . how . . . my God, you lied about all that?”
I showed some canines. “See Annie, I’m ready to find out who I should trust in my life. A war’s coming. T-Bone, I trust him. Val, I trust her. Few of my other friends too. But Ceinwyn? I used to trust her . . . but not after all I learned, not after I realized all the lies both the Divine Court and the Learning Council tell to keep the world spinning. I don’t know all the lies. I don’t know all the secrets. But I know enough not to trust her like I used to as a kid.
“Makes me sad. Guess that’s growing up, learning your hero is a fucktard like all the rest. But that flashdrive? That’s gonna be her test. What I just told you? That’s gonna be your test.”
“Who are you to test me?” she shouted. “How dare you?!?”
“Guess if you care about Nii-Vah and secrets more than you do about me then I’m a dead man, Annie. I never destroyed the World-Breaker. What you gonna do about it? Gonna show me you deserve the same trust I give Val and let me walk away with that flashdrive? Or we gonna have another fight like usual?”
The way her shoulders set gave me all the warning I needed.
Fight it was.
[CLICK]
I sometimes wonder about that room.
I sometimes wonder if I’d just done as Anne wanted . . .
If I’d taken the civilized path . . .
I wonder . . . would they all still be alive?
[CLICK]
Annie B rushed me and when a vampire is rushing you, you don’t have a whole lot of time to think.
Just reaction.
Fucked me good, my reaction. Iron fist like always. Would need to work on that. Had me a twenty-minute-pool and I threw a minute chunk of it into my hand out of muscle memory. The hand closed into a fist and the fist drove forward at
her face.
She slid under it, all sexy female action star with her weight backwards and only her tights carrying her past me. The geo-anima in my fist cracked in the air, expended. She popped up, momentum carrying her to her feet and then a kick whipped around into my back, throwing me forward.
I managed to roll somewhat, colliding with a couch and somehow ending up standing on top of it.
Annie B smirked back at me. “Real smooth.”
“I try.”
“You don’t have a pool now.”
“Shouldn’t,” I agreed. And I wouldn’t have if it had been a few days earlier. But I’d figured out Paine’s trick in Eresha’s lair. Don’t hold the anima inside of you. Hold it just outside of you. That makes the pain possible and not impossible and the possible you can bear.
Nineteen minutes worth of geo-anima surrounded me, my mind and body burning in agony to keep it there. Some part of me thought about how like a Were’s second coat of animal anima it was and wondered about the possible connection.
Annie B raised her gun towards T-Bone’s computer. “Over so quickly, I’m disappointed.”
I snapped her gun in two pieces with a spare chunk of geo-anima.
She stared at the useless hunk of metal still in her hand.
“Impressed now?” I asked.
“You shouldn’t know how to do that yet,” she whispered.
“I’m sure there’s a rule against it,” I snarled, “but we just breaking all them rules right now, ain’t we?”
T-Bone lightning bolted Anne from across the room.
It hit her dead center in the chest, throwing her in the opposite direction, towards the balcony. Her hair fizzed, her black sweater smoking, she still got back to her feet. All of that velvet gaze bore right into T-Bone.
“Oh what the bitching—” T-Bone whispered before the incorrect cursing turned into a wordless shriek as Annie B ran for him.
I just barely got in the way in time, tackling her to the floor in a collision rough enough for the NFL. My head rung and it took me a second to realize I was on top of her. “Come on, Annie, just let me—”
She kneed me.
I grunted, falling over on my side.
Again she sprang right back to her feet and again she turned to T-Bone. “He might be an idiot savant, but you’re just a dime a dozen, Stormcaller. I can see it in your eyes. Those eyes that sing with pride, all of you so sure of yourself when anima is at your back, and now those eyes are only filled with fear.”
Annie B punched T-Bone in the stomach and he flew into the wall, right next to all his precious computer hardware. T-Bone’s not a guy that’s been punched a lot in his life, probably not since the Winter War back at the Asylum. It crumpled him up. Took most the fight out of him.
“Ring,” I managed to get out, not even on my knees.
Problem with being a vampire is that you’re so scary, you push people right past the paralysis phase and into the fight-or-flight phase. Know why I like T-Bone? Down deep the guy doesn’t do flight.
He fought.
.
.
.
And Annie B kicked his ass.
But he fought.
That’s a point in his favor.
She caught his attempted static ring zap with a wrist block, throwing a backhand into his gut to knock him forward. Around came the same arm and down it went into the back of T-Bone’s neck, knocking him unconscious.
When six-foot-four and three hundred pounds crumble, they crumble heavy.
I stood up, hands rising up to guard my face.
She was right next to the computer. All she had to do was reach out and take the flashdrive, crush it in that vampire grip of hers. But she couldn’t resist the challenge. It was the most reaction she’d gotten from me in the last few days and she had to see if she could use it to seduce me yet again.
Smiling, she advanced.
Smiling back, I threw geo-anima into the floor at her feet, sending her down twelve feet into the room below us.
“You’ve got to be joking,” she hissed like a cat that had just been thrown into a bathtub.
I walked around the hole, pulled the drive out of the computer, and put it in my pocket. If T-Bone was still awake he would’ve been complaining about corrupted data.
The pain of the anima still with me, much smaller though it was now, had started to grow comforting. I like this trick.
It explained a lot.
Pool big, keep it with you, grow used to that nagging thorn in your heel. Now I knew why Auntie Badass was such a badass. But this wasn’t all of it . . . the secrets kept going, didn’t they? A year in the crucible and already I’d found out enough to call bullshit about the rest. The flashdrive was in my pocket now. The lies had to end.
Annie B jumped up through the hole in the floor like she was a fucking Jedi.
She landed right next to me.
She wasn’t happy.
I took two chops against my arms and another on my shoulder. A foot kicked out my leg and I slid down to a knee. Unlike T-Bone I didn’t just take it, I lunged forward to wrap up her legs and haul her down with me.
Her legs twisted around my neck and started to squeeze.
If you’re gonna die, it’s the only way to go.
I managed to get an arm in, make enough room to breathe.
“Give me the flashdrive and I won’t snap your neck,” she warned me.
“Let go of me and I won’t drop the ceiling on us,” I warned her back.
“If you could drop the ceiling on me, you already would’ve done it,” she hissed at me.
“If you could snap my neck, you already would’ve done it too,” I growled back.
“It won’t even take a second!”
“There’s ability and then there’s will, Annie. You don’t got the will to kill me.”
“Neither do you.”
“No one’s perfect.”
We stayed there for a second. Annie B on her back with her legs around my shoulders and neck in a triangle-hold and me with one arm dangling useless and the second pushed in-between her thighs just enough so I could breathe.
I tried to bend my useless arm into her hip, but she noticed the SDR on it and grabbed my wrist. “Once was enough, thank you.”
A few seconds more of struggling helplessly against each other.
I sighed into her thigh. “People are gonna talk.”
A single laugh escaped her before she stifled it. “You fucking asshole,” she said instead.
“Guilty.”
She pulled a knife from her hip. I made it melt to the floor with a blast of geo-anima.
“You pool too large for your own good,” she warned me.
“If I hadn’t, I’d be asleep right now.”
She pulled her second knife. I melted it too.
Barely anything left. Maybe an iron fist or two.
Nothing else was there? Cold Cuffs were no good, I could bugger her with the tracking rod for all it would do, the magic balls were defensive, and my knuckles were without a charge after cutting Inanina’s head off.
At least the pain had let up as the anima around me shrunk. The scientist in me considered my new skill, thinking how simple the answer had been. Another case of the secret being right out in the open, easy to figure out if you knew it existed. They don’t just lie to us, they make us feel like fools afterwards.
I didn’t like feeling like a fool.
Thinks the man with a woman’s thighs wrapped around his neck.
“Eventually T-Bone will wake up.”
“I could take him with a—”
I used the distraction to drive us forward on the carpet, right at the hole in the floor.
We fell twelve feet, my weight being on top of her the only thing keeping me from getting knocked out. As it was, my knees were very unhappy with smashing into another floor and my eyes saw stars.
“You fucking asshole,” Annie B repeated, back of her head bloody on the carpet, but her legs
still firmly in place.
“Had to try something,” I muttered into her thigh. Good thing she’s wearing jeans or this would be a whole bunch more uncomfortable. Of course it would’ve provided another opportunity for me to get her off . . . literally.
“I hate you right now,” she stated.
“But you also want to fuck me.”
“HATE. YOU. SO. MUCH.”
“I know, it’s okay, women have that reaction around me all the time.”
The bit of her blood on the carpet started moving back towards her scalp.
“Eww, Annie.”
She smiled at me, velvet eyes victorious.
The blood didn’t go back into the cut, instead it started to build and snake down her face like a slowly stretching worm. Slow, but purposeful. With one destination in mind: my neck.
“Don’t you dare,” I warned her.
“Stop me,” she challenged me, the little tendril of blood moving past her lips now.
I could pull my arm out if I wanted. But I’d have only seconds before she squeezed the arteries in my neck shut. And even if I did pull the arm out, what could I do with it? Iron fist her? I couldn’t reach her head. Not even sure an iron fist would do anything but piss her off further.
I was out of options and that tendril was at her neck, twisting its way across the curve of her breasts and . . .
Anti-Vamp Hot Cuffs!
In the wrong pocket.
Shit!
Over the hump the tendril came.
Not far now, not far at all.
Poug’s dagger.
Poug’s dagger that the secretary of the Divine Court was scared shitless of.
But what if it hurt her?
That tendril is gonna hurt you, dumbass!
I pulled my arm back, found Poug’s glass dagger and slammed it into Annie B’s hip, hoping that if it didn’t do anything I could at least use the leverage to twist my head out.
But it did something.
She screeched like a woman in labor. Like a soldier with an amputated arm. Like a man on fire.
Her legs opened, the fight driven right out of her. The blood tendril went flaccid, a pool of slimy red over the top of her. Her back arched. Her velvet eyes were dark pools of fear and betrayal and uncertainty.
My own eyes widened, my own mouth gaped.
The Foul Mouth and the Headless Hunny (The King Henry Tapes) Page 36