“I’m shorter than him . . .” I mumbled, leaning back in my chair, eyes going to the ceiling of the tent. It was blue. That’s all I remember about it. “Odds are, right? I’m shorter than everyone else.”
Quilt finally took a good study of me. “K.H, are you drunk?”
“Reading my mind?”
“Just your breath, actually . . .”
“Okay . . . a little.”
Always an advisor more than our student-advisors ever were to us Ultras, he pushed his glasses up and gave me his full attention. “You break up with a girl again?”
“Not just a girl . . . the girl . . . my girl . . .”
“Valentine again?”
“Yup, dumped me off cold at third base. You’re out, King Henry Price. Next attempt . . . three innings.”
“Perhaps you should get another girlfriend that’s more interested in what you’re often interested.” Quilt could sure be tactful when he wanted to be.
“I will . . .” I leaned down to put my face on the tabletop. “This is nice and cool.”
“Where are your friends, by the way?”
My forehead on the table, I said into the wood, “I left them for a day. Needed alone time.”
“I’m always here when you need to talk,” Quilt reminded me like we weren’t already doing just that.
“I know . . . Miss Dale ain’t here though? That’s who I’m hoping to see . . . you see . . . I see . . . we all see . . .”
Quilt blinked. “No, C.D’s in Jamaica last I heard. Geomancer we think, maybe even an Artificer like you.”
“Slave like me, you mean. Can’t do what we want; only what the Learning Council orders us to do.”
Quilt probably had a facial reaction resembling enlightenment, but I was too busy staring at my reflection in the table to check. “Ah . . . that’s what this is about.”
“Yeah. I don’t get to have fun deciding and thinking over my options at the Jobs Fair, do I?” A fist pounded on the table. “Nope, I have to be a Guild Artificer. Making the same boring shit that’s been approved for fifty years.”
“There’re reasons for the rules.”
“There’s reasons for prisons too.”
“Right . . . have you even been to their tent?”
“For like a minute. They look like cocksuckers with those hats.”
“You can’t not see them, K.H,” Quilt pointed out, “they’ll just set up a private meeting for tomorrow. Which, now you’ll have to go through with a hangover.”
“I figure I can avoid them for at least another week,” I said to my reflection, which didn’t look too hot.
Quilt tried a different route. “Fine, what else would you want to be then? You’re always talking about how you already get Artificer principles and could go ahead, yet now you’re complaining? You can’t have it both ways.”
I sighed. He had me there.
Some time went by.
“Oh . . .” said a voice. “Sorry . . .”
I raised my eyes just in time to see Val’s sunshine-like hair as she twisted around quick-like and exited without saying anything more. Quilt was nice enough to not make a comment.
He gave me more time to sit there and think, maybe sober up a little, forget about the Guild and Val both. “I love the Mancy. It’s the best part of my life. I’d do anything to become an Artificer . . . but one thing, and that’s become a slave to someone else’s rules. I don’t work that way. It’d end bad for both of us.”
“But is there a way out of it?”
Scooping up a bit of dirt from the tent’s floor, I sprinkled the gravel out on the tabletop. A burst of anima I’d been saving up magnetized the dirt, pulling it together until it formed a hand, with a single finger pointing at the stack of papers. “So tell me about recruiting, Quilt. Give me the pitch.”
Quilt studied me through the rims of his glasses, alternated between my face and the hand on the tabletop. “You’ve got wonderful control of anima, you know that?”
“That’s what Mr. Gullick tells me. Maybe I should try to date Naomi . . . she’s got a nice pair of tits . . . I used to be into tits . . . tits and air conditioning . . . if only Miranda could stand the sight of me, eh?”
“Sometimes, when you’re showing off what a genius you can be with the Mancy . . . I forget how crude you are . . .”
“Yup, that’s me . . . little foul mouth fucker . . . Guild of Artificers Member No. 62523. I even get a lunchbox.”
Quilt ignored my sulking. “You really think you’re Recruiter material? You have to know how to read people.”
“I do that really well actually . . . other than Val at least . . . impossible crazy woman . . .”
“You think the Lady will allow it?”
The dirt hand kept on pointing. “I know Miss Dale will fight for me . . . whatever I decide to do.”
Quilt gave me a pat on the back with the force of a coked-out Chihuahua behind it. “I will too, K.H.”
“If only your opinion counted for anything, Quilt . . .” I muttered.
“Recruiters,” Quilt continued in a deeper voice to let me know he had ignored my opinions about his opinion, “are our frontline against all forms of supernatural troubles . . .”
Session 111
“Baroness Boleyn,” a voice called from the door, “As stupid as always I see.”
The Shaky Stick sat in the middle of the room. The room itself had to be some kind of dance floor most of the time, or at least what was pretending to be a dance floor—though what do I know about Vamps? Maybe they like to get down with their bad selves?
On the dance floor stood a foldout table and on the table sat the Shaky Stick, lying on its side among that pop-wrap stuff kid’s love to play with during Christmas.
The moment Annie B and I stepped inside we’d met each other’s eyes. It might as well have had a sign that read ‘touch and a cage will fall on top of you’.
It’s a trap, but why is it a trap? We both asked ourselves that. I could see the crinkle across Annie B’s forehead. She was thinking, just like me.
San Francisco wants to get rid of the Shaky Stick because it ain’t safe . . . so they pay the Fresno Embassy to take it. Sure, in this scenario, we are going to get jumped in the room as the Fresno vampires realized what we’re there for. That’s in my plan. That’s the way I wanted it. But this . . . this was long term.
This trap had been set up in advance.
We’d made a mistake.
We’d assumed the obvious of why Fresno would take the Shaky Stick from San Francisco, but Sideburns hadn’t been all that knowledgeable about it. It was guesswork—and it was wrong guesswork. If we’d played it Annie B’s way and snuck in we still would have walked into it.
Having crossed the dance floor, standing an arm’s length from the Shaky Stick and hearing the mocking voice shatter its way right into my worries . . . Sideburns had definitely been full of shit. About twenty vampires full of shit—that’s how many burst from the doors into the room to join us and not a one of them pretended to be gated community rent-a-cops. The reason is because all of them were nuns . . . twenty vampire nuns, ready to kill us.
Okay . . . I’m full of shit too.
Not nuns.
But trust me, after you hear what really went down in that room, you’ll be thinking twenty vampire nuns would be a lot less weird.
What actually happened?
I ran into someone more holy than a nun.
“We’re in trouble,” Annie B whispered.
The vampires didn’t seem to have guns. That’s good. “The duke here?”
“Worse.”
“Worse than if you have to duel the duke?”
A strange expression came over Annie B’s face. “For me? Better trained opponent but not as old as the duke. For you? You aren’t exiting this room alive if I die.”
I scanned them all, weighing their threat levels just like I did every person I came in contact with. Normal clothes, mix of races and ethnicities, all
of them young, none older than thirty. Men and women both, different heights and body types, but, whatever the type, it was a perfected version of it—plenty of fit muscle, little flab. And of course, they were vampires, which means the only way to kill them is to destroy their hearts.
And me fresh out of wooden stakes.
My eyes stopped at a woman being bracketed by a pair of particular buff guys. Tall, red headed with her hair pulled back behind her so it v-ed down around her eyes. She had a dress on, simple and white, not modern, old-fashioned. Not decorative, like something a peasant would wear without any cut, but immaculately clean and pressed. Virginal.
At her hip hung a longsword.
What the burninating-the-village fuck?
“I don’t plan on letting you die, remember?” I told Annie B while not taking my eyes from the lady with the sword. She was pretty, could have been beautiful, but wasn’t bothered in trying. She quirked her lips when I spoke. Guess that meant no secrets. Vamp hearing, it’s all out in the open.
Annie B had no expression at all. Her hands were on her knives. “Countess d’Arc, as sanctimonious as always I see.”
The vampires formed a circle. They were all smirking, smug, some even laughed. They had us outnumbered ten-to-one, if those were my odds I’d have been smirking too. But I’m on the other side.
My thoughts were flashing with some good curse words. Whole sentences of them. My eyes danced around the room. Down at the floor. At the ceiling. At the walls. At the vampires’ clothing. Metal beams in the ceiling. Not a whole lot else to use the Mancy on.
The Countess . . . d’Arc . . . wait a sec, I just got that . . . holy fuck! That’s way better than vampire nuns! “You’ve got to be kidding me with these names.”
D’Arc bowed to me. “We are very long lived.” She gave Annie B a grimace. “Sadly.”
“So she’s saying she’s the Joan of Arc and you actually are the Anne Boleyn?” I growled out. “What the fuck, Annie B? Thomas Jefferson going to pop out next? Maybe Genghis Khan? What is this? A shitty Bill and Ted movie?”
“Shut up, King Henry.” Annie B didn’t have the senses available to deal with me; her eyes, ears, and everything else focused on d’Arc. “This was you from the beginning.”
“Yes,” d’Arc said, her hand resting on her sword’s pommel. “I promised you would pay, Boleyn. You had no right to interfere.”
“Where’s Duke Cassius?” Annie B asked, her arms tensing like she might fling her knives into d’Arc’s body at any moment. “If you’ve killed him, you won’t long survive me.”
“I’m not stupid like you . . . I do not murder innocents without the merest hint of evidence, I do not punish the innocent!” d’Arc screamed back.
“Then what?”
“I have restrained him.” A humorless smile. “In glass.”
There were gasps from some of the vampires in the circle. Apparently not all of them had been keyed in to the teamspeak channel.
Annie B seized on it. “I hope you all know that you’ll suffer together. Whatever the Countess d’Arc has done, you’ll be guilty of as well.”
D’Arc waved the accusation away. “They are all loyal to me; you need not bother trying to rend them away. Every single one shall watch as I kill you.”
“Timeout on that, if you don’t mind,” I interrupted. “Why does there even need to be killing here? You went to a lot of work for this, lady: stole something that you shouldn’t have, paid off the guards, gathered a hit squad. What did Annie B do to you that could be that bad? Let me guess . . . stole an old boyfriend?”
Anger crossed that pure face, leaving it blotchy. “She killed my servant.”
“Your European history can’t be good enough that you would care,” Annie B decided for me. “But he was a noble loyal to Louis XIV, a king who caused far too many troubles against the Papacy’s enemies; I was ordered to remove him as my first mission as a baroness. You see, King Henry, Joan has often been rebellious against our masters, while I have done whatever was ordered of me. Yet . . . I’m the bad girl.”
“You had no right to destroy him with the body!” Joan drew her longsword . . . it was long.
“It was an accident! It was my first mission!” Annie B screamed back, pulling her knives, one in each hand. “I’ve offered time and again to pay you reparations for the mistake, haven’t I?”
“Money is the Devil’s tool! It will never bring him back!”
“I can’t time travel, Joan, so that’s all you get!”
“Wrong, Boleyn, very wrong.” D’Arc did some flashy salute with the sword that looked dangerous. “I get to return the favor back unto you.”
“Timeout, damn it!” I interrupted. “Did I not say timeout?”
I grabbed Annie B by the elbow and hauled her a few steps away from d’Arc, into the very center of the circle. “Chill out, alright?” I told her, my hand sliding my first surprise artifact into her jacket pocket. She felt it there; I could see her flinch as she felt it against her side. “Just like in my shop, no need to get bent out of shape,” I hinted.
Understanding flashed in her eyes. “You smart bastard.”
“Told you I wouldn’t let you die,” I said with a grin.
D’Arc laughed, her sword’s tip buried in the dance floor, the hilt crossed to the ground. “The two of us want this. We have built to this moment for hundreds of years. You think you can stop it, little human?”
Short joke . . . got to love ‘em. “Are you two telling me that you Vamps are still fighting over the Reformation in the 21st century? That your whole culture is two-sided between Papacy and Protestant after all us humans stopped giving a shit centuries ago?”
“No,” Annie B corrected, “Vampires have long grudges, but even we’ve given up on that. What I’m telling you is that Joan is a pious cunt who can’t let things be.”
“Pious cunt? You fucking dare, you little slut?” d’Arc yelled.
“Whoa now, even I don’t use that word,” I said to buy more time. “I mean ‘twat,’ yeah, I’ll give you ‘twat’. ‘Twat’ is funny. It sounds like a giggle. But ‘cunt’? Nothing funny about ‘cunt’. It’s like ‘faggot’ and ‘nigger,’ even HBO thinks twice before they use those words. You can’t use ‘cunt,’ Annie B. You got to call her a pious twat.” The circle of vampires were open-mouthed and wide-eyed. “See! A few of them even want to laugh.”
D’Arc shook and not with laugher. Her hands were white, bloodless, which for a vampire running with such a heavy pulse is saying something. “Who are you to get in the way of my justice, you foul mouthed creature?
“Coat gives it away, don’t it?”
“A geomancer, milady,” one of d’Arc’s biggest goons put in when the countess looked for a loss. Apparently, in all the planning for revenge she hadn’t been keeping up with Asylum fashion choices.
Hearing what I was, d’Arc dismissed me as a threat. I saw it in her eyes.
Big mistake, honey, big mistake.
“Of course . . . she hired you to help find the item we stole; only our trap has caught a scavenger along with our prey. Let me guess, she paid by letting you bed her?”
“Nah, that got tacked on extra as a tip, I don’t come cheap.”
D’Arc’s face twisted in disgust. I got the feeling she’d kept up the whole virgin warrior of God thing over the years. “You never change, Boleyn, always thinking with your . . . twat.”
Annie B smirked back. “At least I know what mine’s used for, maiden.”
Could these two have been more opposite?
Loyal whore, disloyal saint.
“Really? Hundreds of years and really?” I asked, completely horrified by that much lack of sex. “Eventually you’d just think the thing would go off by accident in a hot bath or something.”
“Enough!” D’Arc yelled, back to being blotchy. “The geomancer is as inconsequential as the artifact. This is between her and I. Any vampire in this room could kill you, little human, shut your mouth or I will order t
hem to do so.”
She thinks I’m a normal geomancer. Pretty easy assumption to make. Artificers are rare enough and an Artificer willing to hire out to a vampire and who didn’t belong to the Guild? The woman didn’t know what the coat meant; you just know she’s out of the loop when it came to my somewhat-fame in Mancy circles.
Big fucking mistake on her part.
Annie B and I were surrounded by twenty vampires, one of them a countess trained in war when they knew what war really meant. My European history ain’t great, I’m American, even at the Asylum they’ll only teach you so much about other countries. But if Annie B was Anne Boleyn—which I still think is bullshit—then Anne Boleyn was around when they were just figuring out muskets. Joan of Arc was a purely sword and horses kind of gal. That meant like a hundred, maybe two-hundred year advantage to Joan.
But I’d been figuring on an even bigger disadvantage in age when Annie B had been fighting the Duke . . . Cassius was the name apparently. Really hoping it’s not the Cassius, ‘cuz . . . that would be too much. Okay, d’Arc probably knew how to fight. But a general ain’t a champion. To use one of Jethro Smith’s favorite stories, Agamemnon needed Achilles for a reason.
Annie B could take her.
Which left me and nineteen vampires I figured for gentles. Surrounded. In the middle of the room. No chance in hell normally.
But it’s not normally.
Genius Joannie D had placed an Artificer within five feet of the Shaky Stick and thought she had him trapped.
Why not just give Arnold Schwarzenegger a Minigun while you’re at it?
If the Shaky Stick was indeed a Minigun, a weapon and tool, and not in fact something like a thousand-year-old jade dildo.
That would suck.
There are lots of ways I don’t want to die, but dying while holding a dildo is Top Five.
“You sure?” I asked d’Arc. “Really sure any of these underlings could take me? I mean, I’m a fight fan, you know? And you never have the main event without one undercard bout. Seems like we should have ourselves one now.”
D’Arc looked at me like I’d mutated into something worse than a foul mouthed creature. “If you just shut up, then I promise I will not kill you.”
The Foul Mouth and the Fanged Lady (The King Henry Tapes Book 1) Page 24