The Foul Mouth and the Fanged Lady (13 page)

How do you kill one? Stake it through the
heart, then burn the body. The only myth that’s right on the money.
Stop the heart and then the majority of vampires can’t function for
long. They’re trapped, unable to mount any defense as you find the
kerosene to toast their shell. The older ones start to do like Anne
did. They learn to exist outside their shell. But with the heart
down, most are finished.

You have to stab them through the heart . .
. it’s the only sure way.

Back to the idiot in the car trunk.

[CLICK]

I drowsed in the trunk for probably an hour
. . . time is strange in the dark. It can be longer or shorter than
you think. You’re left with guessing. With nothing but yourself for
your reckoning and as we all know: humans are shit at dealing with
their own reckonings. Maybe meditate is a word for what I did, but
I’m not very Buddha. What I did is pool anima to levels I’d never
even bothered to try before.

At the Asylum, they teach you to look ahead,
pool what you’re going to need, and then use it. Don’t hold on,
especially
don’t try to see how big you can go. They never
said why. Just looks and ‘
it’s dangerous
’. Which, maybe it
is. Anima saturation is what drove my mother mad. It’s driven more
than her mad and killed a great many people too. Maybe pooling big
speeds it all up, starts to affect a normal mancer too.

The Asylum is more concerned about control
than power. Ultras know they can pool faster and longer and
probably more than an Intra, but we never get the chance. We were
trained in one-minute and five-minute pools, nothing more. We were
trained in the number of five-minute pools we could make in a row:
pooling, using the anima on a conjuration, and then pooling again.
The amount of consecutive pools varied per person and we took it as
our
power
levels. More than once, I wondered if it wasn’t
one big scam to sidetrack us from the real game. But I never looked
into it.

Not until my life was on the line.

Not until that car trunk.

I pooled for an hour straight.

Forget the axle. I could have cracked the
car in half.

That much anima is euphoric. A beast of its
own making, like some kind of hurricane that’s gotten so big it
builds on itself. I didn’t want to move. I wanted to sit in the
warm water and get bigger. I didn’t want to open my eyes more than
slits, despite that they saw nothing. Seeing nothing was too much
for me.

This is some of what Mom felt
, I
remember thinking.
This is what it feels like to be saturated
with anima
. To be a walking, talking anima vial.

One hour and I could have held more, but I
stopped myself. An iron will of restraint, believe me. Stopping in
the middle of sex. Putting a candy bar down halfway through. Just
one chip. Smelling coffee, but not drinking it. Not clicking a link
on Wikipedia.

One hour of anima . . . I had trouble
conceptualize the amount. Sixty minutes divided by five . . . okay,
twelve five-minute pools. All lumped together.

Fuck me. I was going to cause an
earthquake.

No wonder the Asylum staff didn’t want us
trying this. I’d always wondered if the bastards weren’t
downplaying what we could do, always wondered about how easy it
seemed for Ceinwyn or the Lady to do some of the things they did.
Trick after trick after trick. Now I got it. A five-minute pool
compared to what I was holding ain’t nothing. It made a five-minute
pool seem smaller than it had ever felt before.

And I could have pooled more
.

It’s a damned secret
, I thought in
the darkness. Another damned secret just like all of them before
it. A secret any Ultra can do, they just have to be in on the game.
There’s nothing over the mountains, kiddies. Yes there was . . .
the world was over the mountains. Only if an Ultra had a normal
life with a normal job, or at least a
normal-ish
job, why
would they ever need to pool more than five minutes? They wouldn’t.
So the Asylum teachers didn’t train us beyond that amount. They
pretended like doing it would hurt you. Maybe it would eventually.
But it wasn’t a straight up
cross the line and blow yourself
up
kind of deal. Maybe if I kept pooling like this I’d turn
into Mom. Maybe not. A secret . . . a secret well-hidden out in the
open. I didn’t have a normal life or a normal job and it
still
took a vamp kidnapping me to get to this point.

“Fuck me sideways,” I said just to feel the
magnitude of it.

My eyes opened in surprise.
What else
could I do?

“Fuck me sideways with a shovel-wielding
pelican.”

The car slowed down, turned off the highway,
drove and stopped, drove and stopped, turned, drove and stopped,
turned again and stopped. I didn’t have anything else to study our
movement, so I paid a great deal of attention to those simple
changes.

The car’s engine shut off.

Showtime.

A door opened and shut.

Steps walking off.

Nothing for awhile.

Off in the distance, I heard a road. I
thought about shattering the trunk door and escaping but decided
against it. I had an hour of anima and I wanted to smash Annie B’s
face with it after she’d strangled me
with her blood
.

Escape wasn’t good enough. I needed to
figure out what this was about. How did she find out about me? What
did the person get out of telling her? Did anyone else plan on
using me? Was dealing with Vamps going to keep happening or was it
a onetime deal? The kind of questions most job applicants figure
out over coffee, for me was going to be done only if she was tied
up and I had a gun to her head. A gun might not even be enough . .
.

The footsteps eventually came back, stopping
by the trunk of the car where I eagerly awaited with my can of
whoop-ass.

“Are you awake, King Henry?” Annie B asked
the trunk.

I thought about it.
Why not?
“No . .
.”

“This is going to go two ways,” she said
with a tone so sure of itself I just wanted to punch her . . .
again, “Either I’ll open the trunk and you’ll attack me, probably
using the anima you have stored up. Only that one conjuration won’t
do enough to kill me, it will only hurt me, and then I’ll be
mad
. I’ll take it out on you by beating you unconscious yet
again. Once you’re unconscious, I’ll drag you into the motel room
I’ve just purchased and have myself a snack . . . and I don’t mean
something out of the mini-bar . . . I mean something out of your
mini-body.”

“No liking that one,” I yelled.

“In the other possible outcome: I still open
the trunk . . . but you don’t attack me. You get out and we walk
over to the motel room and we
negotiate
an exchange of
services.”

I’d never met a woman who could make me turn
down sexual advances so easily. “Why do I get the feeling these
services involve me getting cut by a silver knife?”

“It doesn’t hurt, King Henry.”

If anyone ever tells you something doesn’t
hurt—tighten your asshole. “Guess you open the trunk and we see
what we see, Annie B.”

Click.

It was automatic. Slow rising. Just this
graceful movement as the trunk rose up free of any hand. God damned
technology. I’d hoped she’d open it by hand and be right there for
me to kick in the face.

The street lights outside burned my eyes,
reflecting over the gray of the fog. We weren’t in Fresno, so it
wasn’t the Fog, but we were still in the Central Valley, and the
whole Valley could be covered as well some nights, though not to
the extremes I’d learned to live with. Fog and the lights made the
world a hazy reflection of silver.

There was a building—the motel. Annie B was
nocturnal, all vampires were. Sunlight didn’t boil them but it
doesn’t mean they liked it compared against the chilled darkness of
night. I had trouble convincing myself she’d stopped so I could get
a nap in. Bitch was hungry and I’m handy. Negotiating . . . like
I’d let her just slip into my body and suck on me for a piece of
ass, even a quality piece of ass like her own.

I rolled out of the trunk, found my feet.
They were shaky. I took a breath to settle myself, then glanced
around to find her leaning against the driver-side door. Her body
and head were against the metal, like a reptile sunning on a rock,
only in this case she enjoyed the cold, especially the drops of dew
from where the fog had left behind moisture.

“I was always able to seduce you, my dear
king,” she whispered to me. The look on her face had a fair chance
of bringing me to climax without her even touching me.

Why did this chick have to be a vampire? And
a crazy vampire? Just my luck. Beautiful chick . . . fucking crazy.
Story of my life. “Cut the crap, lady,” I told her, “You ain’t Anne
Boleyn. I ain’t buying it.”

Her tongue reached out to lick a particular
large drop of water. I’ve changed my two features theory just for
Annie B. Neck, eyes, and tongue. That tongue has to be included in
the party . . . “I suppose I’m not,” she said.

“What’s the B stand for then?” I asked.

My legs were starting to feel stronger. Any
minute now.

She didn’t answer right away. Her velvet
eyes just kept looking at me, daring me to jump into them for a
swim, to reach and see how deep they went.

“I’m sorry I have to do this,” she finally
said. “We don’t have time for me to find another.”

Yup, bitch was going to eat me alright.
“Find your inner anorexic and go without.”

“I’ve been too busy to eat the last few
days.” She rolled over, pulling her shirt up just enough so her
back pressed against the metal. “When we get hungry, it gets harder
to stay cool. Like an engine without oil. I should have made it
back to San Francisco for a donor, but you were more trouble than I
expected.” She rolled over to her stomach. “It took too much out of
me. I’m old enough to manipulate my blood but not old enough to do
it without wearing myself out. Sorry . . . it has to be you . .
.”

“Well . . .” I said. “I guess I’m sorry too
then. You’re okay for a crazy lady but I have a rule that only I
get to put foreign objects into my own body.”

An hour worth of anima snapped out of me in
a torrent. A dam burst. There was no stopper to it. No way to let
some out and then more later. One go. So much I could only control
a piece, not even a half of it. The rest escaped, filled the air,
found the ground and sunk. The wall behind us cracked. A street
sign across the parking lot bent like rubber. A car’s window
broke.

Annie B took them all in. “That was a waste,
wasn’t it?”

Only I had more than enough left for myself.
To do what I wanted. Anything I wanted. Only requirement was to be
earth or metal or glass and was limited to what my imagination
could come up with. The way she leaned against the car . . .

The idea formed.

Oh, baby
.

I flipped the car over and smashed her ass
flat like she was a Wicked Witch of the East and I’m Dorothy with
some pretty little red shoes.

It wasn’t the car itself I moved. I’m not
Magneto. A geomancer can’t make metal float, it can only manipulate
its form. What I manipulated was the ground around Annie B. A huge
circle of it. Some scientist watching over a seismographer noticed
a very local, very large seismic shift. One strong enough to twist
the ground. To sink the car’s right tires and pop the car’s left
tires on over—center of mass doing the rest of the work. So much
force that the car got air, turned and slammed roof first into the
ground, flattening the vampire who happened to be rubbing against
it like it might . . .
vibrate
.

All I could see from where I stood was her
hand, poking from under the caved in roof. Her fingers twitched. I
remember the glass from the windshield scattered all around it, the
asphalt ground tilted. What was strangest was the silence. After
that one crunching boom, there was nothing else. Just the sound of
the highway not too far away.

The parking lot was deserted. The front
office of a motel renting rooms by the hour is paid to look the
other way. The louder it got, the farther their neck turned. All
that noise for just me . . . and Annie B locked up all nice under a
ton of metal.

She’s lucky I wasn’t in any position to
starting pooling again. I could have crunched the whole thing flat.
The much talked about Hammer of God entering reality.
Could
have
, because I couldn’t. I was drained. It was like I’d run a
mile for the first time in my life and was then asked by some
personal trainer to do jumping jacks.
Could have
, because I
couldn’t even do one measly jumping jack.

I was a gutted mancer. I’d gone anima slut.
Who knew when I would tighten back up?

Good thing Annie B wasn’t going
anywhere.

“Much like your piece-of-shit foreign car,”
I said, noting it was Japanese, “It seems the tables have turned.
Or one might say . . .
flipped
.” Got to give it to Annie B.
Her hand flipped me the bird. That was cute. Woman knows how to
work from the bottom. “How about we start with you telling me what
city we’re in?”

“And what will you do if I don’t, King
Henry?” Her voice sounded unsurprisingly like she was having
trouble getting air into her lungs. They came fast and weak. Not in
pain though. Cool vampire fact: they can turn off pain
receptors.

“I have a vial of electro-anima you didn’t
notice in my coat pocket.” I took out said vial and tossed it
end-over-end in my palm. “Figured I’ll open it into your hand and
see what happens.”

“We’re in Los Banos,” she answered
quickly.

“That’s more like it.” Los Banos is a
shithole of epic proportions between Fresno and San Francisco. I’ve
yet to figure out why anyone not running a fast-food shop or hotel
would want to live there. “Now . . . why did you kidnap me?”