“You know what really makes me want to hurt you?” she asked.
“The letters.”
“The letters,” she agreed.
I’d gotten in contact with the girls she’d ‘expelled’ and got them to write true events about how Catherine was such a good person she played the mean girl just so the embarrassing truth wouldn’t get out about why the girls were transferred. Am I fucking good or what?
“You made me into a hero,” Catherine whispered like I’d flashed some nuns in public.
“It would piss me off,” I repeated.
Catherine had a different reaction than Welf. “I’ll destroy you along with him then. Happy?”
“Suppose it’s the brother’s lot in life. Making sure he’s the one that takes all the blame.”
Catherine’s green eyes moved back to the shrine. She suddenly looked more troubled than Welf had. Yet the expression was strikingly familiar now that I knew the signs. This emotion like the entire world was placing pressure upon them and they weren’t sure if they had the strength to hold up.
“I was the one who talked to your foster parents,” I told her, “and Welf’s generally too much of a colossal dumbass to have paid any attention to the fact that you don’t share a whole lot of features with your younger ‘brothers.’ Don’t think you have anything to worry about, Kitty Cat”
“But you figured it out.”
“Some of it. Don’t get why you don’t just come out with it. Seems like that would fuck Welf and all his family up enough as it is, family shame and all that. Why all the hate? So you’re a bastard that never got to suck off a rich titty, so what? What you do, figure it all out when you were twelve and go searching for him? He tell you to fuck off?”
“Ten . . .” Catherine whispered. “But I never met him, only her. She had the police come and arrest me as a thief. After my parents fought to get me back out of the system, a man showed up at my house and brandished a gun . . . he put it right up to my eye and told me it was what killed little girls who tried to ruin a happy ending.”
“Moira von Welf is fuckin’ gangster, yo.”
Catherine’s face twisted in hate. “She knew I’d be a mancer. She knew I’d come here. She bribed a recruiter to mark me as mundane. I’d be in a real asylum by now if . . . but Ceinwyn Dale double-checked on me. Only she and the Lady know.”
I nodded. “So that’s why you don’t tell and why they don’t expel you. That’s the deal.”
“That’s the deal,” Catherine agreed in a whisper. “But I can still hurt her children, and if they expel me for it . . . then the deal is off.”
We both stared at the shrine for a bit.
Catherine would be a sad figure if she ever tried for sympathy. But sympathy—feelings—these are not things that Welfs are good at. She didn’t want sympathy, what she wanted was satisfaction—an answer for her pain.
“So was it cathartic to beat up your little sister?” I asked her eventually, voice filled with rage at the very idea.
Here’s where we’re a different type of monster. Catherine’s eyes flashed in memory. She shuddered out a breath heavy with euphoria. “Yes . . . it was.”
“Not again. Come at me and your brother if you can.”
Catherine smiled at the attempt. “Don’t worry. It’s already in motion. But for now . . . I mustn’t be late for my first Sunday in the Holding Room, must I?”
As she walked past me, her hand flicked and a slash of aero-anima sliced a gash above my eye. Blood trickled down immediately.
That time I didn’t flinch.
Session 161
It was a restless night.
I returned to my suite at the Ouroboros after it was obvious Eva wouldn’t be waking up any time soon. A whole cadre of Rejuvenation Society hydromancers were with her, but they didn’t have a clue between the whole gaggle. “She’s . . . healthy,” one of them told Welf. “Vitals are good, brainwaves are present. There’s a large amount of strange anima in her system that shouldn’t be and we’re not sure how to flush it out. Slush isn’t helping, neither is direct conjuration. We have other Society doctors who are flying in to consult. For now, we just have to wait.”
Good for nothing.
Good for nothing just like the Guild.
Like the Learning Council.
Barely know the world they’re living in.
Tell everyone else not to talk about it so they’re not revealed as phonies.
T-Bone went to talk to Vicky and never returned. Pocket and Jesus were asleep when I got in. In the same bedroom now, not being very stealthy about their fucking. Well . . . that’s an improvement.
Step forward.
Kick in the balls.
Fall on the ground.
Football pulled as you try to punt it.
All that shit together.
Eva.
And Annie.
Poor Annie . . . didn’t even know how much she was suffering at the moment. Didn’t ask her to do it for me, but she did.
Val off in London still . . . where’s my badass superhero girlfriend when I need her to pick me up? So the both of us can walk on through the finish line together?
Nowhere in sight.
I have to kill Conan Sapa today, I realized.
Conan Sapa who kidnapped Christmas.
Conan Sapa who killed Jason.
Conan Sapa who I imagined standing to the side, laughing his ass off as Paine or whoever else did the same thing to Eva that they did to him, only . . . corpusmancer and some fucking werebull ain’t the same thing as a Shadeshifter and the Wolf Nation Alpha.
I had thirty minutes of anima in me from that morning.
When I’m back home, usually in my shop—I rarely used my home—I use the excess anima to work on glass sculptures just before I turn in for the night. Yeah, yeah, not something you expect out of King Henry Price. But it relaxed me to work with glass. Could do anything with it. So brittle, so weak, so delicate—everything the earth usually ain’t.
So beautiful and precious.
I remembered holding Eva’s hand.
Remembered being in bed with her at the Asylum, both the fun part of grunting and humping and just sleeping with her afterwards.
She used to kick my ass in her sleep. Didn’t mean it, but she was always flipping back and forth, moving around, changing positions. Just the way she was. Dead to the world and she’d be bouncing in the bed, shaking her leg, nuzzling her head against my chest . . . her eyes would pop open suddenly in the darkness and then I’d feel lips on my chin and neck.
Don’t feel like making something tonight, I thought.
Feel like breaking the world in half.
I used my thirty minutes of anima to trash the entire living room of my suite. Television. Tables. Lights. Wall fixtures. I even went out on the balcony and broke the infinity pool finally, water rushing out over the side of the building. I was high enough to see that garish snake motif as it circled just below me. Good thing I don’t have my World-Breaker, that golden bitch would fall to the ground too.
Jesus and Pocket woke up and watched the last minute or so from their bedroom door, all the way down the hallway where it was safe from exploding objects.
“Go to sleep,” I growled. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
They went back in their bedroom.
Hold each other tight, don’t last forever.
On the snake turned, forever eating its tail.
[CLICK]
Got maybe three hours sleep.
For once I didn’t bother pooling anima to start the day.
Would need to wait until the fight was close.
Would need to time it all right.
Stepping foot in that cage with as much anima as I can hold.
Felt worse waking up that day than I did shitfaced the first night in Vegas. You have a hangover, you should at least do something to earn it. This was just anxiety and worry and all the shit I’m not used to doing. Feelings. Damned feelings again. Damned
strings yanking me one way and the other.
Not sure when I noticed the burner phone sitting beside my bed.
Someone had put it there, even had a stick-it note on it that said ‘Please talk. You just need to talk.’
I glanced around my room. It was empty. Way too early in the morning to be up, but like I could ever go back to sleep. Needed to call the hospital and check on Eva. Needed to talk to the Tsar about the schedule for the Day of Elementalism. Need to prepare myself to kill a guy again.
Third time’s a charm.
Now on top of all that I had a mysterious phone by my bed.
I opened up its directory.
Only had one number.
Obadiah.
I blinked at the number. Thought about throwing the phone out my window. “Still trying to make us friends, Isabel?” I asked the empty room.
At least . . . I thought it was empty.
That’s when I went around opening all the drawers and closets.
Crazy stalker chicks, man.
At least the mundane version can’t shapeshift.
They just dye their hair blue.
Certain I was alone in my room, I sat down on the bed, cradling the phone in my hands.
Obadiah glinted back.
In that word I saw his eyes, twin diamonds cutting at me as he crushed me like a bug in that Seattle warehouse.
“She . . . freed me from all the ties they bind you with. The Guild. The Institution. All strings are cut. All expectation has vanished. I’m free to do whatever I wish. However I wish. No half measures, not any longer. I am an Artificer without limits.”
Cut cut cut.
“I am not mad, King Henry Price. I am merely too sane for this world to accept.”
Cut cut cut.
“The barking of a small dog that knows its weakness. Yapping incessantly to prove how very big it is not. Very loud when it is in its own domicile, yet in the wilderness it learns the truth, does it not? It learns it is prey, not predator, no matter how tough its words may be.”
Cut cut cut.
Paine.
Oh.
Ba.
Die.
Uh.
Thanks, Isabel. Didn’t think I’d get to tell him to ‘fuck off’ for awhile yet.
I clicked the call button and put the phone to my ear.
The other side picked up almost instantly. “Speak.”
No pleasantries with Paine.
Just a command.
“What would you like me to say? Specific curse word you’d like to hear, Obadiah? Or will ‘fucktard’ do it for you?”
Silence.
“Don’t be like that, Obadiah. I really felt like our relationship was going somewhere last time . . . ya remember? Me dropping the building on your ass with an earthquake? That’s like first base with me.”
Couldn’t see him at all, but I could hear the hate and pain and rage in his voice. “King Henry Price . . . it seems I will need to punish Isabel when she returns home.”
“Don’t be too hard on her. She just wants us to be friends, Obadiah. Good pals. Chums. Allies. Fuck buddies. World’s just one huge orgy to Isabel Soto.”
“Stop saying my name so casually. I do not have friends. Not any longer. They are . . . beneath me.”
“It make you angry, Obadiah? Make you want to cut me?”
“It belittles my status. It creates a familiarity between us that does not exist, as if we could ever be equals. I have come too far and risen too high to be spoken to as a child of five.”
“Thought you wanted me as your partner?”
“Partnership does not equate equality. Even before our first meeting I was beyond you in all aspects of our craft. Since our meeting, my understanding of the world’s true nature has only grown exponentially. Indeed, it would have grown even greater had you not interrupted my business with the Welf boy.”
“Yet for all that superiority, it took the novice you want to crush like a bug to show you the truth. Let you see a piece of heaven. It broke you all over again, didn’t it, Obadiah? To know all them legends, all them myths, all those childish stories that have no place in the science of artifice might be the truth.”
“My ability to accept new information and to accept truth . . . has always been my hallmark. Even if championing said truth has brought about hardships, it cannot be abandoned.”
“Like the fact if you kill off a chunk of the planet’s population suddenly you don’t have a problem with Anima Madness being out of control? Heard that was your plan that pissed off Ceinwyn back in the day. Real genius needed to come up with that one.”
“I don’t expect you to understand my reasoning, little dog. In fact . . . I know you do not possess the mind to do so and never will. Yet . . . I do stand by my conclusions regarding Anima Madness. Though it was not Ceinwyn but Amis who took offense, if he had not then perhaps . . . but Fate pushed me in another direction. A . . . purer direction.”
“So you have given up on it.”
“I have abandoned her dream and created my own, one that runs counter to hers.”
It was both a terrifying statement and one that made me relieved. At least I can stop worrying about Paine showing up with a World-Breaker and wiping out San Francisco or Los Angeles. Even if whatever he’s come up with on his own is even worse. “What’s that, Obadiah? Planning to drive every mancer as mad as you are?”
“Too sane,” he corrected.
“So much for truth, eh? Pretty little lie you tell yourself as you walk your asylum grounds. I’m not crazy. This is just normal. Better than normal. Too sane for them all to see my genius. Don’t listen to the screams. That’s sanity.”
“As I said: I do not expect you to understand my reasoning in the past, much less in the present.”
“Guess the partner deal is over then?”
Cut cut cut. “Quite over.”
“What will I do with myself now?”
“Enough mockery . . . we were playing a game before your earthquake interrupted us . . . what say you to us playing it again, little dog?”
Question and answer.
Had a lot of questions I wanted to ask him.
Giving him solid answers beyond my mockery though . . . that could have serious ramifications.
“I ask first,” I decided. Let me get in a question before he ended up asking something too close to home. What questions are most important to me? What his plan is? Confirmation on why he killed Jason? What did he do to Eva? Is there anything beyond what I’ve figured out when it comes to what the Mancy can do? Is the Tsar telling the truth? What about Vega?
Lot I needed to know and evil or not—one of the only people on the planet I used that word to describe—Obadiah Paine was a fount of knowledge.
“Acceptable,” Paine said. “Ask away, little dog.”
“What did you do to Eva?” I went with. If there was something he gave away I could use to help her get out of that coma, or whatever it was . . . better than the rest. People first . . . the opposite of Paine.
“I did nothing to her,” Paine stated simply, yet you could hear his own mockery in the words. I’m smarter than you, King Henry Price. You asked a badly worded question and I’ll make you pay to prove it. “Was the World-Breaker truly destroyed as you claimed to the Divine Court?”
“No,” I pushed through gritted teeth.
“Expound,” Paine ordered.
“Give shit answers, get shit answers.”
Air hissed out of his nose as he barely held in his displeasure.
“Come on,” I told him. “You know you want to tell me all about it. I might not have a mind equal to yours or as sane as yours or as free as yours, but I’m the closest you’ve got to someone who might just understand your genius, ain’t I? Must be nice having Isabel with you, especially the way she can look like Ceinwyn and curb all them bodily desires been building up since you were fourteen, but her mind ain’t so sharp, is it? Changes too quick. Can’t focus on what it wants. Hard to contr
ol her, hard to get her to see the big picture outside of her needs.
“You want to tell me, so do it. Go back and give a better answer to that first question and I’ll do the same.”
Paine is smart. Dangerously smart. But he’s also arrogant and a megalomaniac. Likes to talk. Likes to monologue. Just need to push him into it by stroking his ego. Even if he knows that’s what I’m doing, he can’t help himself.
After a long silence, Paine finally accepted the string between us. Hard, sharp, going to cut a bitch, going to make both of us bleed, but there it was. “What happened . . . was not by my will. One of my underlings took initiative in the moment. Truly . . . I’m very proud of her. She is a find that belies your belief in how lonely I find myself. You think this is just the misfits of society crying out, but it is more than that.
“This society, this civilization as it has been built cannot stand. It is built on slavery and servitude. Others see this now. Not only those I’ve found and saved from Anima Madness, but those taught at the very Institution we both graduated from, even those who teach at that Institution, who walk the walls of ESLED and sit among Ceinwyn’s chosen few. They taste their lies and spit them back out . . . then I find them and give to them stolen truths.”
The craziest part of Paine is that he always says things that I’m thinking, except when it comes from him I start doubting my own sanity. “I hear you,” I managed to grunt.
“Before I met you, those lies held even me in check. I never dared believe how deep they go. But now . . . I seek more stolen truths in any way possible.
“What happened to Eva Reti was the result of one of those experiments, taken too far. You asked for her first because you hope I have the key to her regaining consciousness. I do not. Experiments of this nature have results that cannot be predicted.”
“What was done to her?” I snapped at him to focus the pontification.
“Expound,” he ordered again. “Then I will give you a lesson.”
“The Jinshin Ken of Hiroto Arashi was held by the San Francisco Vampire Embassy. Countess d’Arc had it stolen and used it to lure Baroness Boleyn to the Fresno Embassy, where I switched it out with an artifact of my own making that was destroyed. It’s main use is its ability to turn naturally accruing anima into a refined anima close enough that mancers can use in conjurations. If you let it build up, you can cause an earthquake. But if you keep it down with frequent siphoning, you have a steady supply of anima vials to use on geo-anima based artifacts.”
The Foul Mouth and the Mancy Martial Artist (The King Henry Tapes Book 5) Page 56