King Henry Short Pack One (The King Henry Tapes)

by Richard Raley

  I don’t know.

  The youngest child always struggles for this information. He wasn’t around for enough of it. By the time King Henry was born, everyone was already what they’d be. The Path was set. Not as bad. Not as broken. But . . . living in the same house? Check. Dad already with the same job? Check. Mom taking care of us kids? Check.

  Some part of King Henry remembered it being different. He remembered being safe and cared for every moment of every day. He remembered new baby clothes. He remembered loving hands carrying him around the house. He remembered a sweet voice whispering lullabies to him.

  Dad probably whispered to me too, though his voice ain’t sweet and I dare say the songs were likely Johnny Cash knowing his tastes.

  Better to think on that past than on the Gap. Capitalize the bitch. The Gap. The Gap in Mom’s chest. An anima abyss. Lungs forced to rot. Body forced to kill.

  Lullabies and Johnny Cash hurt less than the Gap.

  King Henry wiped his face clean again, as discreetly as he could. Totally teenager. Ain’t feeling nothing. You don’t know me! Don’t give them an inch. We’re at war, ain’t we, adults? Such little shits, all of them teenagers . . . especially King Henry. He was a long time from learning that if the adults were at war with him, really at war with him, they’d stomp him in five seconds flat.

  The tears might have fled with his sleeve, but his face was still red as King Henry turned to study Ceinwyn in the driver’s seat. The same Ceinwyn Dale as always. Auntie Badass. Blond hair, blue eyes that cut, smile that cut, voice that cut too. Not to hurt you, just to play with you. All whimsical and shit. She wasn’t at war with the teenagers, but she always played a game with them. It was the same game she played with adults too, no matter your age, standing, or occupation. She made the whole Asylum feel like they were in on a secret with her.

  She wasn’t smiling now.

  Wasn’t playing a game now either.

  She drove toward the Asylum, silent, alone in her thoughts.

  She gave no comment at all about the teenage boy in the passenger seat, who tough-as-nails and emotionally scarred as he claimed to be, still couldn’t help but occasionally tear up over the new damage he’d sustained that day.

  “How many funerals you been to?” King Henry finally broke down and asked, if only to keep distracting himself.

  “Too many,” she said.

  “Parents, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Friends?”

  “The One in a Million World is a dangerous world, King Henry.”

  “Yeah . . . suppose you don’t mention that in your recruiting pitch very often: oh, by the way, vamp might eat on your daughter twenty years from now if you say ‘yes’. Just doesn’t put the butts in the bus seats, does it?”

  “As you found out today, there are worse terrors to claim a mancer than vampires. Even if they make for duller stories,” Ceinwyn pointed out, still with no smile.

  Yeah, vampires . . . what’s scary about blood creatures living in host bodies that want to suck you dry and from what Mrs. Ambrose had taught us in History of Elementalism, have done a pretty good job over the years?

  History of Elementalism . . . it hadn’t been one of King Henry’s better classes. That had been during Single. He was a horrible student then but was a halfway decent one now. Vampires . . . Weres . . . He’d perked up a bit when they described all the world’s monsters hidden from mundane sight. Not that they told us everything . . . but enough. Whole history of Rome was about vampires versus mancers. Protestant Reformation was a vampire civil war. Conquistadors was the vampire freakout over Weres existing. It was weird to look at history in a whole new way. Not that King Henry had looked at history at all before the Asylum, but . . .

  He was a better student now.

  Yeah.

  With a whole new reason to focus on my studies.

  To forget the Gap.

  Ignore it and it goes away.

  At least . . . that’s what he hoped.

  Because he couldn’t make it go away stuck in the car with nothing to do . . .

  “Not much further,” Ceinwyn whispered, seeming to sense his sudden agitation.

  Seeming to sense . . . but how?

  Motherfucker. King Henry let go of the anima pool he hadn’t even realized he’d been building. Bring up Single and here he was almost accidentally discharging anima like a brand new student. “Sorry,” he said aloud.

  Ceinwyn downplayed it. “About?”

  Auntie Badass . . . she was pretty cool sometimes.

  King Henry forced himself to stare out of the window and not think about anything.

  Trees. Mountains. Roads.

  Mom’s dead . . .

  Well, that distraction lasted really long, you asshole. What’s your next genius plan? Gonna watch the Sixth Sense or read Hamlet to get your mind off death?

  He needed to break something. He needed to punch something.

  A wall.

  Or . . .

  A wall sounded really good.

  Fill my hand with geo-anima and just punch the fucking thing into rubble.

  There was nothing to punch in the car; nothing to break either, not unless he wanted to go flying.

  Technology, why you got to be so against us geomancers?

  Or maybe it was the geomancers who didn’t get along with technology.

  King Henry wasn’t sure.

  More trees. More mountains. More roads.

  They were pretty close to the Asylum, King Henry figured, so if he was going to ask, he had to ask now: “You ain’t gonna needle me again, are you?”

  A smile broke out on Ceinwyn’s face despite the mood in the car. “I suppose we can skip it just this once.”

  He turned back to the scenery such as it was. “’Kay, cuz I don’t want to have to kick your—”

  And then she stabbed him in the neck with the Giant Fucking Needle.

  King Henry didn’t know what hurt him more: the betrayal of the act . . . or that he couldn’t tell Ceinwyn was lying to his face.

  Nah, pretty sure it’s the Giant Fucking Needle going into my neck.

  Yeah . . . he was pretty sure it was that one.

  *

  King Henry woke up in his bed at the Asylum.

  Which did not best please him.

  Welf laughing as someone hauled King Henry through the common room filled his mind.

  Know what? Fuck the wall . . . know just what I fucking want to punch right about now.

  It had been much too long since King Henry took a shot at Welf.

  Think it make the Gap disappear, Price? Think it make you forget for just a moment?

  He hoped so . . . he hoped so.

  It had to be past midnight, but like King Henry could go back to sleep. He supposed some people handled their grief by doing nothing but sleeping. Ain’t no Gap in my sleep. Ain’t no hole in Mom’s chest. At least not when he was drugged up . . . but then King Henry got to thinking: what would he be dreaming about now that the Giant Fucking Needle medicine was out of his system?

  Yeah, this shit is why people turn into alcoholics.

  He got out of bed, happy to see that this time no one had changed his clothes while he was unconscious, since he was still in the jeans and t-shirt from the day before, not Asylum colors.

  He knew that whole common room well enough to get around without light. He’d probably slipped out of bed to sneak around the Asylum more than any other student at the place. Feel for privacy curtain. Down to my knees. Down to my belly on the carpet. Roll under the curtain. Pause to listen for voices. Hands down, push up. Walk down the hallway. Take a right. Feel for the doorknob. Pull back on it before you rotate or it will squeak. Apply pressure upwards on the door or else it will squeak too, then swing open.

  The common room was never completely dark. They had these secondary low-watt LEDs that blasted through the night. It always reminded King Henry of back home during the spring and autumn, of opening his window all the way and
watching the stars by moonlight. The LEDs colored the common room in the same dark blue hue.

  A world of outlines.

  Just like that outline in Mom’s chest.

  King Henry closed his eyes, just standing there for a second.

  *

  He wasn’t sure how other people reacted to death. This was how he did it. Don’t think it was healthy? Go fuck yourself. Think he was being wimpy and emo? Double go fuck yourself. He’d just lost his mom. There was going to be some angst.

  His mom was King Henry’s entire connection to being at the Asylum in the first place. Miss Dale’s little bomb about Mom being a mancer was what sealed the deal. Sure, he’d agreed before then, but learning he could go insane? Learning he might . . . just might, have a chance to teach his mom some of her own control one day? That he could fix her? Just maybe? The smallest sliver of hope?

  Yeah.

  The sliver was gone.

  The Gap replaced it.

  So go fuck yourself.

  A sixteen-year-old boy had to come to terms with death and loss and . . . all the shit that just makes life grand.

  .

  .

  .

  Like blowjobs.

  *

  King Henry let out a breath and reopened his eyes.

  And it was just a dark room again.

  A room he’d walked through more than a thousand times by now. He was at the Asylum. He was safe. Or . . . as safe as you could get at the Asylum. Giant Fucking Needle notwithstanding, King Henry generally trusted the Asylum staff to not physically harm him. Though, even after two years, he still thought they were also generally full of shit.

  You think everyone is full of shit.

  “Damn right,” King Henry whispered to himself.

  Crossing the common room, he sat down at the Study Tables.

  It was better than lying in the dark, but . . . not by much. The teachers controlled the TV, the computers, the lights, pretty much everything except for the plumbing in the bathroom. Which probably says something about the line of true civilization not being entertainment but being able to take a piss and flush it down the pipes.

  Someone had left a textbook out on one of the tables.

  He grabbed it, flipped it over.

  Elemental Prophecy and You.

  King Henry scowled. The one class I’m not looking forward to this year. If prophecy was actual prophecy that would be cool—and a little freaky—but from what he’d already read in some of the books he’d stolen from the Library, real prophecies that foretold great or even small events were extremely rare. The stuff a mancer could do was more about self-regulation through reading anima currents around you and in your body.

  Complicated for something so shitty.

  Elemental Prophecy and You.

  King Henry wanted to scoff, but he was desperate for distraction, so instead he opened the book and started reading.

  *

  He wasn’t sure how long he read.

  Three or four chapters.

  Not only was the stuff complicated but for some of his classmates it was going to be disgusting.

  A geomancer like King Henry . . . he would pick up some dirt, charge it with anima, and drop it on a whiteboard. Val got to watch the flames. Eva and Miles some shadows. But the poor faunamancers and floromancers? Shit sounds like it’s going to be a nightmare of dead animals and plants.

  Pigeon innards? Who the fuck thought up this shit?

  Bunch of bullshit, he thought quite a few times.

  But he kept reading.

  Why couldn’t it be an Elementalism as a Weapon book?

  But he kept reading.

  Would have even taken Advanced Elementalism . . . Gullick makes it sound like this year is going to be awesome.

  But he kept reading.

  Until someone shook his shoulder.

  And he came within inches of punching her in the face.

  Miranda Daniels let out a little yell and dived backwards out of King Henry’s reach.

  He put his fist down on the table, trying not to feel bad about his reaction and succeeding.

  They glared at each other in the electric moonlight.

  She had softened her whole I-Hate-The-Foul-Mouth Act since Val and King Henry broke up in the spring, but not by much. “What is wrong with you? Throwing punches at random strangers?” she hissed like usual. Only, as she got ready for another complaint, she seemed to remember something and it died in her throat.

  Then it happened.

  Pity Look.

  From the Ginger Nemesis.

  Pity from Miranda Daniels.

  And King Henry was happy for it. All of a sudden, the terror was gone and there was a reason for anger again. His pure fucking rage that helped him survive all those years growing up in Visalia. It came upon King Henry, wrapped him up, made him feel warm and protected. It helped him ignore everything he wanted to ignore.

  “Touch me again and I won’t stop next time,” he warned her coldly.

  Miranda flinched at something in his face, glancing away from his eyes. “I’m . . . sorry.”

  Damn, that feels fucking good. Keep stoking that fire. Nice and warmed and loved. Sign my ass up for the Dark Side. Anger, baby, it’s a magnificent bastard.

  “Just leave me alone,” he said.

  But secretly, he wanted her to stay. Wanted her to keep going. She did. “The teachers told us about . . . what happened. Mr. Gullick did. Halfway through the day . . . there were rumors by then that you’d been expelled . . . and . . . I was happy you weren’t expelled.”

  “Happy my mom died instead, huh?”

  He didn’t know what she saw in him, but she took another step backwards.

  One day, he wouldn’t be proud of those moments in his life.

  He’d think: sixteen-year-old-me, big man scaring a girl trying to be kind.

  The continued evolution of Miranda Daniels into a kinda, just slightly hot chick for men who could stomach the ginger was well on its way by then. Still ginger, still average height at best, but . . . kinda attractive if you dig the school-girl with some ta-tas on her. Of course, King Henry never went there. Even when he was at his most depraved and violent in those months after his mom died.

  Miranda was Valentine’s best friend after all.

  Even good ol’ hate sex between the two of us would destroy any chance I have at winning over the love of my life a second time. So Miranda joined a small club of girls at the Asylum to never even tempt King Henry in an area he very much liked being tempted in.

  Instead, he thought of her as a really annoying pest of a sister. Or a cousin he was stuck with for the summer. Cuz your Aunt Brunhilda was on a Caribbean cruise banging some poor pool boy who didn’t know he signed up to become an overused fuck-toy when he drunk-knocked on her cabin door the first night of the cruise.

  Just as an example . . .

  “Where’d you find the book?” she asked like King Henry was five.

  King Henry glanced down at the thing. He’d almost forgotten about it, being so angry. Forgot about everything else as well . . . Yeah, this is a dangerous road I’m walking down. “Someone left it out,” he reluctantly said.

  “Just skimming?” she asked again. Academics are firm conversational ground for Miranda. “Mr. Fisk hasn’t even assigned a reading yet.”

  “Seemed like something to focus on.”

  “I wouldn’t put much stock in it. I read the first couple chapters, just to see what the class would be about, and I can’t say I’m very enthused we’ll be learning anything worthwhile.”

  King Henry gave another sigh. “Go to bed, Miranda.”

  “You shouldn’t be alone.”

  “I want to be alone.”

  “What we want isn’t always what we get.”

  “Ain’t that the Rolling Stones truth.” Suddenly, King Henry wasn’t all that distracted. He closed his eyes again, trying to block the Gap in darkness.

  Miranda’s hand touched his shoulder a
gain, but he didn’t swing this time.

  “Want to play chess instead?” she asked.

  “You always win.”

  “But you’re getting better.”

  “Sure . . . I guess.”

  *

  Miranda fell asleep at the chess board about an hour later.

  It was just a little bit adorable.

  In a horrible ginger abomination kind of way.

  The clock read 5AM by then so King Henry got a jump on the day. He broke down in the shower, weeping hardcore for the first time since the funeral. There was also another twinge of anima build up during the crying before he realized what was happening. He released the pool into a tile. It cracked in one place . . . but at least you could barely tell.

  Cleaned, showered, shaved, new clothes—back in his geomancer colors.

  King Henry was still a mess.

  He still wanted to be left alone, to be able to lick his wounds in peace.

  When that alarm goes off, I’ll have twenty-nine people up my ass.

  Sorry, King Henry.

  Tell us what we can do, King Henry.

  Are you okay, King Henry?

  There’s some fucking prophecy for you, Mancy.

  Pity Look.

  All day it was going to be the Pity Look.

  From everyone.

  When he heard the buzz of the alarm, King Henry fled outside to one of his favorite benches, this one just outside the dorm building.

  *

  Pocket found him before King Henry was ready.

  Given how Pocket smelled, he probably hadn’t even showered in his rush to find his friend.

  Floromancer, yes, but he doesn’t smell like roses, let me tell you.

  Pocket sat down on the bench next to him. “How you doing, dude?”

  “How you think?” King Henry asked without looking. He couldn’t take Pity Look from Pocket. He’d do something he wouldn’t just regret years later but instead would regret immediately.

  “Angry, I’m guessing. Knowing you.”

  “Yeah, angry.” Scared. Hurt. Feeling mortal for the first time in my life.

  “What you need from me?” Pocket asked.

  “Just leave me alone.”