Also might stick around longer if her father doesn’t catch her getting motorboated in the Park, but . . . that’s a few weeks away thankfully!
Naomi weighed it all. Dinner, wine, chocolate, having to put up with dating the infamous Foul Mouth, it being another slap to Pocket—who the girl had never forgiven for that Sabine slight, her getting one up on Boomworm by being my rebound girl.
That all make Naomi petty?
Maybe. She is a little. Nosy and spoiled too.
But she’s also fun. Flirty and girly and all that. Fierce, open, and a little shallow.
“I know about a stairwell that takes you up to the top of the Admin Building,” I sweetened the pot. “We can have a picnic up there, all by ourselves.”
“And what would you do with me when you have me alone, King Henry?”
“Whatever you want me to do to you, Naomi, and no one will ever have to know about it if that’s what you want.”
Except for all of you that are listening to this tape.
And her father.
And everyone who saw Mr. Gullick chasing my half-naked ass through the Park.
And everyone who saw Naomi screaming, “Don’t kill him, Daddy!” as she trailed after us with her bare ta-tas flapping in the wind.
So, ya know . . . it worked out fine.
Session 148
You ever feel like you don’t belong somewhere?
Actually . . . that ain’t it.
Shit, I always feel like that. That’s the definition of sanity as far as I’m concerned. Feeling like you’re not part of society, that’s a healthy attitude to have. Questioning everything you normally take for granted, every instinct and impulse; looking inside and saying: why are you doing what you’re fucking doing?
Why are they doing what they’re fucking doing?
What makes you an individual and not a cog.
Suppose T-Bone and Pocket would be mocking me for all that. Here he goes again.
Feeling like I don’t belong is my natural statue of being, so I keep saying it. Occasionally I do belong. If I have to admit it, I belonged at the Asylum. With Val I always belong. Makes me want to belong instead of just laughing over all that civilization shit people keep working so hard on. Hate to admit it, but part of me belongs with Annie B too . . . that monstrous, damaged-beyond-all-repair part of me.
Tomorrow I knew I would be in a community I didn’t belong with. T-Bone and his gamers. Don’t mind nerds really. Geeks, dweebs, dorks, chose your own pejorative. I don’t fit so well since I’m another kind of arrested, but I don’t mind them. Comics, superheroes, that slice of nerd I can speak to. Stole that shit by the dozen when I was a kid. But the digitalized version? Was too poor for it.
Did find an old Nintendo buried in a closet—the original one—when I was a little kid, poor old dusted thing you had to blow out just to get it to work for ten minutes. That was back before the ‘Bad Days’ piled up. I remember Dad showing me some of the games, laughing with me as I tried my best to climb the ladder of Punch Out boxers.
Eat shit, Soda Popinski.
You and your laugh, eat a whole steaming bucket of shit!
Wonder whatever happened to that thing? Can’t even remember when I stopped playing with it. Can’t even remember when it disappeared from under the TV.
Huh.
Don’t know about gamers specifically, but I been friends with a few geeks in my day. T-Bone ain’t the first. Russell Quilt and his gossip always came with a required card game, monsters and dragons shit just like T-Bone’s digitized version, but with appeals to not bend the cards too much. Val’s got some geek in her. Reads Fantasy shit all the time, watches Fantasy shit all the rest of the time. Better than romance novels, I suppose. Not that I should be one to judge with said love of men dressed up in capes and underwear.
Before my gossiping with Quilt began, I always kept an eye out for the geeks in Visalia. Can’t claim it was honorable. Can’t even claim I gave a shit about them. Was just an excuse back then. Didn’t even know their names most of them. Just knew some assholes liked to bully them. So there I’d be waiting . . . hey, asshole? Why don’t you try to steal my lunch money? Why don’t you try to call me a ‘nerdy faggot’ and see what happens?
Didn’t have friends before the Asylum.
Didn’t belong.
The feeling that grew every second I was inside of the Ouroboros was worse, even more mysterious than belonging. It felt like I should belong. But I didn’t.
Supernatural casino.
Should’ve been excited for gambling and drinking among mancers and Weres and maybe even a few Vampires I could tolerate.
But I felt disjointed. Out of phase with reality.
Ouroboros Casino and Hotel. Ouroboros Hotel and Casino.
Snake eating its own tail.
Felt more sober than I had in months; forget since I broke up with Val.
Didn’t like it one bit.
Ceinwyn liked to talk about the one-in-a-million world. That quarter slice of Ultras that the Learning Council reckons regularly deals with supernatural shit. Me . . . I felt beyond even the one-in-a-million world. Felt like I’d broken through. Gone above or below. Know things they don’t.
Was something else too . . . like some shitty 60s robot screaming ‘warning!’ just behind my head.
You know what it is, you just don’t want to admit it. Don’t want to accept how much shit those dumbass innocent friends of yours just tossed you into.
That’s the truth. Hard truth. Truth made one of them strings at my back vibrate. Ain’t no supernatural casino popping up in Coyote Nation territory without Horatio Vega being involved somehow.
And as anyone who’s met Vega knows: it’s when you don’t see him and don’t know how he’s involved that he’s at his most dangerous.
The room had something in common with a corporate office, where all the action was divided by a line of secretaries paid to be pretty and paid to keep away the riffraff. The floor was a pale wood and the ceiling also a wood, but so dark as to be black. Not a wood guy—outside of the kind I get in the morning—so I can’t talk grain or what tree it all came from, only the colors. Up on the ceiling, the word ‘Ouroboros’ repeated itself one after another, five times in a row as it formed a perfect circle cut from that dark wood. Spectro-anima light of golden hue leaked from somewhere above it all.
Ouroboros.
Ouroboros.
Ouroboros.
OUROBOROS.
OUROBOROS.
It’s a weird word, ain’t it? The word representing a symbol of time and eternity and it’s almost snake-like itself with the way its letters curve into and roil against each other. Where does the ‘O’ begin and the ‘R’ end? It’s some straight up archetypical shit, stuck in the human consciousness far and wide, back to the days of mother earth and sky gods, maybe even before them.
Come on, you fucktard, not like you haven’t seen worse. What’s this place got on the Divine Chamber or the Great Bank? You’ve stood in a dragon’s lair . . . quit being a pussy about it. So what if Vega is around? What could he do to you that he couldn’t already do in Fresno?
If he planned to kill me over Hector, he already would’ve done it.
Right?
Exactly, no reason to be a scaredy-cat about it.
Right.
Might want to keep that thirty-minute pool handy though.
Just in case he gets tempted.
I always do nowadays.
Been practicing holding a pool outside of my body too, so I didn’t have to burn it all at once. Didn’t even hurt, so much as feel like a nasty annoying bramble grinding at the back of my neck.
“They told you it was impossible. So the pain the skill causes made you give up. This is an animal’s response. A human, if he knows a goal is possible, will hold on through pain.”
Damn right, Paine.
Damn right.
Fucker was crazy and evil, but that didn’t make him wrong about everything.
> Just the imprisoning mancers to use them as anima-batteries stuff.
And the kidnapping kids stuff.
And the trying to murder me stuff.
Remember when your life was simple and you just kicked bullies in the balls?
There were five desks with waiting women, arranged in a kind of semi-circle that blocked a large entrance on the other side of the room. I could only assume it led to the main floor of the complex. There were two other smaller doors, trying to look unimportant and unassuming. One would be for employees. The other for some gun-wielding guards to rush in and kick our asses if we tried anything.
But will the ones inside be mundane humans or Weres or maybe even some Intras?
No one else waited in line.
Guess we missed lunch hour.
Or everyone is already here gambling their life savings away.
T-Bone headed for the receptionist in the center. A little Mexican woman in a black dress somewhere between party night and kick-your-ass secretary. She was pretty, but not beautiful, her hair and features and makeup pleasing but not overly complicated or distracting. Not imposing at all. None of the five women in the room were. Three others were Latinos as well, the last was Asian.
I studied the five as T-Bone introduced himself.
Harder to tell a Were woman than it is to tell a Were man. Ain’t that they’re any less on the power scale—pretty sure JoJo could have kicked Hector Vega’s ass if she really wanted to get rid of her guard way back when all my shit with the Coyote Nation started months back—just that they’re better at hiding the something-extra than the men seem to be.
Still, Were Nations do tend to be patriarchal. Fitting I suppose, given the way Vamps seem to go in the other direction and mancers are somewhere in the middle. Balance in all fucking things, what would the world be without it?
At war.
World War Mancy.
One of these days, Hypocrite Price. Gonna break it all. Know you are. All you do is break things. Break the peace itself. Gonna prove Ceinwyn right in not trusting you. Why should she trust you when you can’t trust anyone else? Question for you, Dirt King: is break, break, break any different from cut, cut, cut?
I stretched my jaw, trying to calm down.
Booze left my system too quick under all the adrenaline. Had a headache. Felt like throwing up. Too much of that repressed week of blackout coming back to me at once.
All inside my head.
Around me the world went on cogging away.
[CLICK]
Our receptionist introduced herself as Tammy . . . which I tried not to hold against her.
Sometimes having a name as shitty as ‘King Henry’ is a plus over the boring crap normal parents brand their children with, is all I’m saying. But on the other side . . . sometimes your parents name you Cucumber and you got to deal with dildo jokes for the rest of your life.
Despite T-Bone and me needing our passes, Tammy had eyes for only Pocket.
Can’t take Captain Fernthrower anywhere.
He just sucks all the pussy in the room towards him like a black hole.
A pussy sucking black hole.
“Already have mine,” Pocket said bashfully with perfect boyish charm, holding up his Ouroboros passcard like it was a shield. It had the Ouroboros snake logo on it and a picture of Pocket with his name and room number. In addition to being ID to keep the guards off your back, it seemed to also serve as a room key.
If you lost the thing you probably got an anal probe.
With a cucumber.
Tammy really wanted Pocket to give her one.
Sans cucumber.
Wait . . . there’s got to be a floromancer joke in there somewhere . . .
“We deactivated it when you left this morning,” Tammy told him breathlessly, “I’ll need to swipe it so you get your access back. You’ll be locked out of your room otherwise and we wouldn’t want that!”
Pocket blushed as Tammy took the passcard and swiped it through a reader, tapping away at a keyboard for whatever commands it needed.
I could never play that ‘aww shucks’ angle. Too much ‘fuck off’ in my eyes.
Tammy peeked up over the edge of her monitor. “What day was it that you’ll be competing?”
Pocket glanced at me. “We allowed to . . . talk about that in here?”
Tammy laughed, waving at the other women. “All in on the little secret, aren’t we? Nice man like you would never try to sneak in anyone who shouldn’t be in on the secret, would you?”
Yeah, I’m seeing why the Learning Council hated the idea of this place. Would be a bitch for ESLED to police all the rumors springing up about it. I pushed Pocket just to get some more info out of the clammy bastard. “Yeah, we’re all on Team Freak, ain’t we? So what day is it you’re competing, Pocket?”
Tammy’s eyes went squinty. “Pocket?”
I winked at her. “His nickname. Used to always have his hand in his pockets as a little kid, so that’s what his sisters called him. Of course no one knew it was cuz he couldn’t stop touching—”
“Weren’t you drunk?” Pocket complained loudly.
“Sobered up when you failed to mention this place was owned by . . .” I trailed off, frowning at Tammy, “who was it again?”
“Nothing to fear over,” Tammy said through a friendly smile. “Plenty of your kind and plenty of my kind on the corporate board, sir. Ouroboros is about having fun! Where we can be ourselves! No need for all the old tensions, is there?”
I gave her a smile back, but it wasn’t quite friendly. Don’t do those much better than I do ‘aww shucks.’ “Suppose so.”
Tammy had a bit of Texas in her accent. Thicker than Miranda’s had even been when she arrived at the Asylum. I studied the other women. They were mostly working at their desks and ignoring us, but the Asian noticed me and nodded like whatever Tammy had said was the truth. Asian wasn’t a werecoyote. Neither was Tammy.
Pocket answered before I could say something stupid.
. . . stupider than usual . . .
“I’m not the one competing,” he told Tammy. “It’s my . . . other friend. You met him. Jesus?”
See . . . it’s just not as funny when you say it correctly.
Tammy nodded. “Not as cute as you?” she flirted. “Had those dogs with him? That’s right! I remember now . . . it was the Day of Speed!”
“Yes,” Pocket said, trying to ignore my ‘oh really’ expression, “Day of Speed.”
“Any hint on what he’ll be racing?” Tammy asked. “It’s all so hush-hush that even us girls don’t know the cards.”
Pocket gave his own friendly smile that gave nothing away. “Hopefully you have tickets so you can find out.”
“No fun!” Tammy laughed at him. She finally turned to T-Bone. “Need your state ID and your mancer ID, hunny; plus, I have a bunch of security questions for the database! You know how it is! Got to check you out to make sure you’re you!”
Name: Tyson Bonnie.
Mancy Type: Electromancer, Ultra.
Height: six-foot-four.
Weight: Two-hundred-and-eighty-six pounds.
Business: Bonnie Computer Consultations.
Really annoyed me how close those initials were to some big black cock jokes, let me tell ya.
The opportunities wasted!
After Tammy was sure T-Bone was Tyson Bonnie, she had him look at a spot at the back of her computer monitor where a camera snapped a picture of his face and then his passcard was ejected from another machine. She handed it to him with a smile not nearly as friendly as the one she’d had for Pocket. “Room 415. Queen bed and a pull-out couch. Small kitchen. Hasn’t had a soul in it yet so you get to dirty it up for the first time! Is this other gentleman your plus-one?”
“Plus-one?” I snapped.
“It doesn’t necessarily mean like that!” he said back.
“What? You have a problem with gay people, Tyson? It’s 2019—”
“No!” T-Bone ye
lled at me. “You are not trying to play the Faux Social Justice Warrior card just because Pocket’s here for you to have an audience that doesn’t want to punch you in the face afterwards!”
Tammy chuckled at us.
See. I’m never first choice. But I always get that laugh eventually.
“Name?” she asked, hand out to take my IDs.
I gave some predator grin back at her and Tammy worked hard at keeping my gaze. “King Henry Price,” I said. The three werecoyote women all looked my way on cue. I turned my grin on them. “Got a problem with that?” I asked.
Tammy glanced back and forth between her coworkers and me, partway typing my info in her machine. “Should I . . . know that name?”
The most senior of the werecoyote women held up a finger for us to wait before leaving the room via the employee exit.
Pocket let out a deep breath. “So . . . did I mess up?”
Tammy stared at me. “Who are you?”
“Can’t be sure, but I’m betting one of your bosses is my brother-in-law. We don’t get along too well . . . and dumbass Pocket brought me right here to him.”
“It wasn’t all me,” Pocket mumbled.
I pointed at T-Bone. “The other dumbass helped.”
“No vampires at least,” he whispered sulkily.
“Yup, no vampires . . . so far.”
[CLICK]
A manager came out to apologize to me.
Not sure why.
But he acted like I shit gold and he upgraded me from the shitbox T-Bone booked to one of the smaller suites they had open, apologizing yet again that the bigger ones were taken by people the Ouroboros couldn’t eject and this was the best they could do for me on such short notice.
He handed me ten thousand dollars in chips in the form of a credit card.
He said my accommodations were on the house.
Including whatever I ate out of the kitchen.
Which was pre-stocked with food and booze.
After he left, apologizing for the billionth time, Pocket gave a glimpse around my new lushly carpeted living room, which was by itself bigger than my actual house in Fresno. He put his hands on his hips and shook his head. “I thought he wanted to kill you?”
The Foul Mouth and the Mancy Martial Artist (The King Henry Tapes Book 5) Page 11