“The whole Learning Council?”
“It was a conference call.”
“Oh . . . wonderful.”
“Since the Learning Council knows that means the Vampires Embassies will learn about it and when they learn about it, that means my shadow will learn about it.”
“Your shadow is a Vamp then? It’s not Annie B, is it? I’m gonna be really annoyed if two ex-lovers are running around Vegas without inviting me for the fun.”
“No . . . it’s not her. Classified, remember?”
“Keep your secrets, mine are better.”
“So,” she kept going, annoyance finally thickening her Israeli accent into existence, “to hunt my shadow I plan to start hunting his prey: Isabel and Sapa. I will call you again if I find anything.”
“Can I join you?”
“No.”
“Why?”
“We would probably have sex.”
“Oh yeah, wouldn’t want that to happen with a fight coming up. Sap my strength Delilah and all that,” I teased her.
“Exactly.”
She hung up on me.
“I really need to stop making her points for her on why we shouldn’t sleep together.”
“Who was it?” Vicky mumbled to the room, now cross-referencing her lists against each other with lines of differently colored lights hanging all over the place.
“Eva.”
“Oh,” Vicky stated absently.
“She asked how you were doing, Tyson,” I lied.
T-Bone almost dropped his tablet. “That’s nice,” he said neutrally. “I finally got the documents she promised to send.”
“She send anything else in them? Like pictures?” I teased him.
Across the room, Vicky’s lines of spectro-anima went into an Abrams lens-flare fit.
“Please stop,” T-Bone begged me.
“Fine, fine. No one’s any fun. Except Welf.”
“He’s unconscious,” Vicky reminded me.
“That’s when he’s at his most charming.”
“We’re very busy, King Henry,” Vicky pointed out. “Perhaps you should go check on Jesus and Pocket.”
“They have it handled.”
“Or go gamble some more.”
“They have my money.”
“If you don’t stop pestering me while I’m trying to plan this funeral, I’ll strip naked and mount Tyson right in front of you!”
“Um . . .” was T-Bone’s only comment.
“Can I join in?” I kept right on teasing the both of them.
“Out!” she yelled at me. “Or I’ll paint a portrait of how we found you the other night and I’ll gift it to the Learning Council!”
“Okay, okay! I’m five years old, I get it. I’ll go . . . play with my artifacts or something. By artifacts, I mean my—”
“OUT!”
[CLICK]
Nothing bad ever happens in elevators.
Should have been on alert.
Paranoid for months and then I miss the signs.
Eva literally just tells me there’s a Vamp in town.
But then . . . that worked against me.
Wasn’t no Vamp in the elevator with me, just another Were in a hotel filled with Weres. Didn’t have no gun. I could take him.
Right?
My own damn fault.
Didn’t notice him pulling a Giant Fucking Needle out of his pocket until he rammed the thing into my neck.
“Every. Fucking. Time,” I managed to grunt out before crumbling to the elevator floor.
[CLICK]
I dreamed of the earth trembling above my head.
I dreamed of eternal imprisonment.
I dreamed of thirteen cages crafted from my own flesh, made of sacrifice and betrayal.
Of darkness stretching into infinity.
Of decades without a single thought to alight my mind.
Of blood held supreme and worshiped, far beyond my reach.
For many millennia I was held trapped.
For those millennia I pushed, prodded, and scratched at my own flesh.
For release I prayed . . . but to nothing, for nothing was above me.
At last came the first hole, the first speck of light.
At last the people of my prison found me and gave to me tools to work with.
At last I reached beyond the realm once again.
To other lands.
To other prisons.
To the realm of my enemy itself.
There I finally heard them.
There I finally could make out the whisper of feet and soft voices upon the earth.
There I felt what remained of the traitors and their masters.
One, I only need one.
One, just the right one.
One, the greatest one.
[CLICK]
I woke up with a hell of a headache.
Did I just feel wings on my back? I thought, before realizing where I was and what a predicament I was in.
Predicament.
Or how I would usually call it: in deep shit all the way up to my balls.
Someone knocked me out.
Took me to wherever here is.
But they didn’t kill me . . . so that’s something to work with.
I have a disgusting amount of practice with this scenario.
Thanks Annie B, you’re always helping, ain’t ya?
Only Annie B was better at noticing me faking being unconscious than the guy who drugged me this time around. He was busy moving about the room, humming to himself. Didn’t open my eyes yet, so can’t be sure what he moved about the room doing.
More time you have to pool anima without the other person noticing is a plus in this situation. In the supernatural world, time is almost always on a mancer’s side. Unless you’re talking centuries and then the Vamps win out.
Unless something is even more eternal than they are, I thought, recalling my dream and feeling foggy on just what I’d felt during it. Was that Meteyos? Was I Meteyos?
Kept my breathing even. Nice, calm, asleep breathing. Listened. Smelled. Felt my body.
No artifacts. They had all been removed.
Shit.
No SDR on my finger. No SHK up my sleeve. No Magic Little Balls in my pockets. No Cold Cuffs . . . though given their track record maybe I need to do a total redesign on them. No anima sight monocle . . . sorry, still haven’t come up with a name for it. No anima tracker discs. Not even my GOB in my belt loops.
No glass-metal vampire-sucking knife in its specially-tailored hidden pocket. No World-Breaker . . . I didn’t bring it . . . back in Fresno. In my hidden lair. Under the ground. In a thick metal table only a geomancer could open up easily.
Guarded by Mini.
Supposedly guarded by Mini.
Unless Mini is hiding out in my GOB.
I wasn’t tied up very well.
Just my hands, although those hands had been forced together in a clasp before the rope tie was placed around them and my wrists. It felt ceremonial more than functional.
If Javier Castillo is about to sacrifice me to some Jaguar Aztec god, I’m going to be really pissed. Especially since that asshole has seemed so pleased about the fact he’s finally getting his blood sport at the Ouroboros like he wanted all along.
The guy in the elevator had been South American.
I was sure of it.
Well . . . I mean, I’m white. But I live in Fresno . . . so like fifty-fifty on my “Guess the Hispanic” powers.
I’d immediately seen he was likely a Jaguar and it relaxed me, I remember that much from the elevator. Not a Vamp, not a Coyote from Vega finally thinking about offing me, not Grant Little for whatever psycho reason he had to hate mancers, not Master Zhou turning into a Panda or a . . . what else do they have in China? Golden monkeys? There’s a monkey king, ain’t there? Okay, so my “Guess the Chinese Animal” powers are shit.
Was sitting in a hotel chair, but not the kind I had in my suite, more like the cheap kind
you expect at a Motel Six, where you’re glad it at least has some cushion on it and ain’t just nothing but metal. Speaking of which . . .
Fuck, it’s wood.
But my ankles weren’t tied to it, so there’s that.
Smell.
Sterile. Clean. Was that bleach? Just a hint though, like it was still in a plastic container. No body odor, no lived-in staleness of people camping out in a hotel room for a few days. No coffee on the coffee maker. No food at all.
Sounds.
Couldn’t hear a refrigerator running. Did hear bed springs like the guy who kidnapped me was sitting something down on it and picking them back up one by one. Maybe my artifacts. Could be contracted by the Guild. Can’t believe I’m playing this game again. Who’s Trying to Kill King Henry Now? 8PM, next Monday, every Monday, we’ll kill him eventually!
Anima.
Pool up that anima.
Need every drop of it.
Pool like your life depends on it.
It does.
Pool like you’re in the Geo Realm. Saturated with the stuff. Breathing it in. Pissing it Out. Like when you got back and it was so easy. You remember what that was like? Eight months ago? Really don’t look too smart not going back there to top off again, does it? Sure, you’re still faster than you were before, but it’s taking longer to pool by the week and if you’d just picked up that World-Breaker and made a quick jaunt . . . okay, so the dragon might have tried to eat you. Don’t be a whiner!
A scraping noise started.
Metal on metal.
Or maybe he’s just a serial killer with some machetes.
When I had three minutes of anima in me, enough for some iron fists if nothing special, I risked opening my eyes.
Mistake.
Not that the guy had noticed me.
Just . . . I love alcohol, I really do. It’s been established. Even smoked a joint in my day, mostly before the Asylum—outside of the Lady’s pot brownies, it’s hard to find that shit on campus. One time I even snorted some coke out of a girl’s asshole—she asked me to do it, I felt like I was obliged, okay? But I never been a drug guy. I mean, I have magic, why the fuck I need psychedelics in my life?
I don’t know what it was, but there was more in that needle than just the knockout juice.
Pink elephants with butterfly wings!
Squee!
So cute!
Come and touch my nose, pink elephant!
I’ll name you Herbert!
I’d call you Babar, but you don’t have a cute little crown on your head, do you?
No you don’t!
I blinked.
Fuck me, this shit is so strong it turned me into a fan girl for a second there.
I blinked again.
The imaginary animals disappeared, but the room still looked covered in a film of luminescent oil.
Hotel room alright.
Cheap hotel room. Two twin beds. Disposable.
Still . . . someone should’ve seen me getting dragged in here, even if we were close to the elevator. Either Vega was in on this or someone hacked security cameras. What are the odds that T-Bone is still watching me on the feeds and not having sex with Vicky right now?
Yup, don’t think he’s coming to my rescue either.
No one’s coming, Price.
You’ve told everyone to fuck off one by one.
All alone . . . just you and the crazy guy who actually is sharpening a machete.
Lots of knives.
Cleavers even.
In a row on top of a nice roll-out chef’s kit. Just not cooking oriented cutlery. More like the stuff you’d expect from Dexter.
The crazy guy in question was the same South American Were as in the elevator, so he was acting alone. At least as far as the killing me part of the operation. Would be a conspiracy of epic proportions behind the decision to kill me part.
This is why you should’ve brought the World-Breaker.
So you’d have used it to bring the whole arena crashing down to the ground when you were trying to capture Isabel. I mean, really? What’s ten-thousand people dead in the grand scheme of things?
My artifacts were laid out beside the knives. In a row. He’d even tagged them with little evidence markers.
As for the Were himself . . . nothing particularly special about him other than the way he held himself. That professional stance of a man at the top of his game, kind of stance I associated with Vega’s guard Sharp, or Conan Sapa, or any of the other trained killers I’d come across in the last year of my life.
At a five-minute pool, just enough for a smaller blast of Paine’s explosive conjuration I’d taken to calling a geo-mine, I finally spoke up. “You gonna make me kill you, ain’t you?” I spat, trying to moisten my mouth. “Couldn’t even wait for a guy to die in his own fight to the death . . . that’s just rude.”
He didn’t flinch. But he did turn towards me.
Oh yeah, them eyes said all that needed to be said about how many people would be walking out of this room. “You’re up early.” His accent was carefully masked. You could be from South America and not tell what country he came from.
“Don’t use the same shit the Vamps and the Asylum use next time.”
He nodded, pulled out a notebook from his coat pocket, and made a notation. “Did you dream at all?”
I showed him my canines. “Yeah, I was a fairy princess and everything.”
He marked that down too before he closed the notebook, putting it back in his pocket. Next, he turned to pull out all the knives one by one, which he crossed the room to set on the bed closest to me. “I understand you like to break metal,” he informed me, “so I prepared with replacements.”
“Always appreciate a considerate assassin,” I said, still pooling anima.
“I have a question for you before we begin.”
“I got to warn you, man. This whole talking instead of killing the person you should be killing thing, it usually goes badly. I say this as someone who’s been on both sides of the coin.”
He nodded at me. “I agree with you.”
“Oh . . . wait . . .” I frowned. “Fucking drugs.”
He showed the first bit of emotion: a smile. “A very ancient recipe, crucial to this ceremony, as is our talk. If I had my way I would have already killed you. But if I had then I would fail my initiation and in turn be slain by my eternal brothers.”
I nodded. “Oh, so you are working for Zhou. Wonderful. I’m some kind of sacrifice then I take it?”
He returned my nod. “We will get to this, but for now, my personal question . . .” he went over to my artifacts and returned with my glass-metal knife. “What is this? Your dossier mentions all the rest—though perhaps not as modified as some of them appear to be—but it makes no mention of this blade. It is very unique . . .” He tried to bend it, but couldn’t, even with the veins on the back of his hands straining. “Most impressive.”
“It kills vampires,” I told him. “Sadly it don’t do anything to your kind. Whatever your particular brand of kind is.”
Weres, always getting in the way when your eyes are on the Big Bad.
He went back over to the other bed and marked the knife with an evidence tag, writing on it. “Did you make it yourself.”
“Took it from the Curator,” I lied.
“The Curator . . . we are very interested in him. Unlike you, he hides away from us and has yet to be initiated in this ceremony, though surely he is deserving of it.”
“Deserving? You got a fucked up philosophy, Zhou’s Boy.”
“Are you distilling anima?” he inquired, a lot like the way a dentist would ask if Novocain had kicked in before drilling out your cavities.
“Oh yeah.”
“Good,” he said, “then we can begin.”
Well, that’s a new one.
He picked up a pair of knives, one in each hand. I braced myself to break them, but he didn’t rush me. Instead he stood exactly seven feet away from me. I cau
ght him peeking down to check it twice. I directly faced him, hands bound, but feet free. If I wanted I could rush him, but as I’ve pointed out . . . more anima the better, right?
I could already break both those knives and maybe have enough left over for an iron fist. He thought I’d just started. But I had a jump on him. Why he was waiting for me to have a pool was anyone’s guess. Although I had a feeling it had to do with this ‘ceremony’ shit. One Were, one mancer. Not a fair fight, but not unfair. Although even with the toughest Were, maybe binding the mancer’s hands and giving him a pool does balance out to fair.
Zhou’s Boy bowed his head, taking in a deep breath measured enough to be the beginning of a meditation exercise. “I will now begin the ceremony. My initiation into the Eternal Order and your initiation unto the Great Serpent’s Ladder are one!”
Lucky me.
Still waiting for Zhou’s Boy to attack, he didn’t. Though he did meet my eyes. “You are not allowed to ask questions. You are not allowed to speak. Speech is considered readiness and will allow me to attack you. Do you understand this, King Henry Price?”
For once I kept my foul mouth shut and nodded.
I’m gonna have to kill you. You’re gonna make me do it. Ain’t gonna be an accident this time, but self defense, but still: Body Number Two. Then Conan Sapa soon after . . . ain’t I just getting good at this shit?
“I will tell you who I am, what I am, and then I will tell you a story. This ceremony is expertly crafted to give both of us an equal chance of surviving. Do you understand, King Henry Price?”
Just like I thought. I nodded again, glancing across him at my tagged up artifacts so far away.
Break both knives, run for what? HSK? Magic Little Ball? Just attack him, throw him off guard, get lucky? This guy looked good. Good enough to kill me. Seen better, but I always say I’m a lucky and enthusiastic amateur at this game. Sure, I beat Annie B now and again, but that was never a fair fight. Always packed myself with tons of anima beforehand, had all my artifacts. If this ceremony had been planned as fair . . . well, it wasn’t. I’d have a little over ten minutes of pooling by the time he finished.
If I kept my mouth shut.
What else did I have to work with? Floor, of course. Steel beams. Concrete. Framework in the walls. Springs in the bed. Knives themselves that Zhou’s Boy waved about in front of me. Got to be some way to cheat.
The Foul Mouth and the Mancy Martial Artist (The King Henry Tapes Book 5) Page 42