The Foul Mouth and the Fanged Lady (18 page)

“What she means to say,” I translated for
the two men, “Is that we beat the crap out of each other. How about
you boys back off?”

Annie B rolled her eyes. So did Gentewoman
Moore. Vamps or not, they were still using female shells. “What
Artificer Price
means to say
is that he took extra
convincing to agree to help us with our problem, but since he
has
agreed, he’s under my protection and I’ll be the only
one feeding off of him.”

“Yeah . . . I’m still not cool with that
arrangement . . .” Thinking any feeding at all was bad.

“
Artificer
Price?” Gentlewoman
Moore’s whole face looked shocked, eyebrows going wide. Could she
just have one uncute expression? It wasn’t fair . . .

“Yes,” Annie B showed teeth to everyone in
the room, “He might not look it, but he’s going to solve the
problems you’ve created for me. Whether he solves your problems,
gentles, depends on if you were involved with this theft. Why don’t
you stuff the threats towards him before I start to feel hungry
again and start looking for other sources of nourishment?”

Her tongue darted across her lips for a
spare second. Not a one of them could meet her eyes. Couldn’t blame
them . . . they looked crazy.

Just how much of a badass is Annie B?

[CLICK]

The place went down into the earth, or at
least the human-shit passing for earth in San Francisco. The five
of us descended—with me and Annie B leading the way and Gentlewoman
Moore fretting behind us, her goons Sideburns and Linebacker
relegated to the kiddy table at the very back.

It’s this classical winding staircase of the
same white stone as the outside, wide enough for five or so people
to walk side-by-side without any bumping. What surprised me more
than the secret underground passage—classic vampire bullshit
right?—was that the place got colder the farther we went. It
started freeze-your-balls-off and ended up freeze-your-fingers-off.
By the time we hit the bottom of the stairs even the Vamps looked
uncomfortable. They liked it cold, not freezing, and those rooms
were freezing.

Only Annie B seemed unfazed, running hot
like she was. The rest of us breathed fumes of fog. I was left to
breathe into my gloves and rub my chest and shoulders to keep
warm.

“You hiring cryomancers too? I think my
teeth are going to crack.”

Annie B glanced back over her shoulder. “No
whining.”

“It’s a security measure against humans,”
Gentlewoman Moore explained, having caught up with me. She smiled,
but even it couldn’t beat down the worry in the rest of her
expressive face. Made me want to hug her. Which ain’t my usual
instinct. “We don’t like it this level of cold, but we can suffer
it. For humans . . . it slows you down. It makes you less
intelligent than usual, your brain too concentrated on the
cold.”

“A problem if you got a little brain to
begin with,” I growled back at her, thinking the concept sounded a
whole lot like my Cold Cuffs.

“Are you trying to play dumb, Artificer
Price?”

“Who’s playing?” I asked.

Her face told me she didn’t buy it.

The stairway ended, turning into a vaulted
hallway of metal and tile. Suddenly we’d jumped from the Dark Ages
into the 21
^st
century, all steel and LED lighting,
computerized locks on doors flanking the hallway, readouts and
palm-scanners, plus some kind of hole that at first I thought was
for a key.

Not for a key.

“Ain’t there a duke or something running
this place?” I asked as the hallway kept going, doors trailing
behind us. The city government probably would have crapped itself
if it knew there’s a secret underground vampire complex running
beneath the neighboring area of the embassy. I guess it’s one way
to beat unfair property taxes.

Annie B answered me, “The Duchess Antonia
keeps a traditional schedule and is sleeping. Which is why we must
deal with her trio of sun-fucking goons.”

Judging by the look on Sideburn’s and
Linebacker’s faces, ‘
sun-fucker
’ is a phrase that’s going to
fit right into my foul vocabulary. “Couldn’t wake her up?” I asked
my new buddy Moore. “The Law coming to town . . . kind of thing
bosses like to be waked up for.”

All I earned was, “We need our sleep,” and a
nod at Annie B’s outfit and perhaps her attitude.

Yeah, beginning to see that one. So vampires
needed blood and rest and cold temperatures. If not, they got
erratic, started rubbing against cars to cool down, wearing almost
no clothes and going full-out slut, drawing attention to
themselves. As disadvantages went it wasn’t exactly silver and
garlic, but at least it was something to know they actually had
disadvantages.

I’d made Cold Cuffs and those were a bust
against the Vamps, but maybe something else would do the job. Hot
cuffs? Couldn’t use pyro-anima, too volatile, throw them on someone
and the person’s likely to spontaneously combust. Spectro-anima?
Might work . . . might work . . . take a lot of it though . . .
spectro-anima converted at the lowest rate, right beside scio-anima
. . . but—might work.

“They’re also hoping I’ll be gone by the
time the duchess is awake,” Annie B pulled me back from formulas,
“so they can pretend I was never here. Creating a myth that every
part of the San Francisco Embassy is in perfect working order and
that an item entrusted to them over one-hundred years ago wasn’t
stolen away right under their noses.”

The gentlewoman glared as if her eyes could
wipe Annie B off the face of the Earth. Finally something not cute
. . . started to get worried. “We did everything we could under our
own power.”

Annie B only snickered back, still walking
down the hallway-that-never-ends. “Your own power is surprisingly
weak.”

“And how are we supposed to track a vampire
leaving no prints or DNA? Who somehow hacked a blood scanner?”
Gentlewoman Moore asked heatedly, while behind me the goons nodded
agreement. “We have no evidence
at all
and your attempt at
using a geomancer to follow the item blew up in your face!”

Annie B gave a good shot of that deep gaze
of hers, pulling you in, eating you up. “I have more faith in
Artificer Price’s abilities to notice anima than your coked-out
blood-whore.”

Blood-whore
. . . look at me learning
new words today.

“Where you find the little shit anyway?”
Linebacker asked. “And what did you pay the Guild of Artificers for
his services? You indebted yourself and your superiors won’t be
liking
that
, Baroness.”

Annie B’s gaze drifted to me. It’s a miracle
the woman hadn’t walked into a wall the way she looked backwards.
“Artificer Price isn’t a part of the Guild.”

Damn right he ain’t. “He is getting paid,
however, despite him being kidnapped and all,” I added as a
reminder.

“Hope he’s worth the trouble,” Linebacker
muttered, cracking knuckles in a message so obvious it was almost
rude. “Humans aren’t supposed to know about this, even mancers.
Especially his kind—it was part of the agreement for our holding
the item in the first place. You might not have been here when it
first arrived in town but I remember the day well. Humans didn’t
just die that day, so did vampires. What happens if you find it and
he uses it?”

So, an artifact for geomancers. That’s
interesting. For all our Artificing, it’s rare to use geo-anima. We
get so caught up in playing with other mancers’ areas we forget
about where we came from.

“He’ll be a good boy,” was all Annie B
said.

What is this thing?

[CLICK]

That question flew yet again as we finally
stepped into the room which had been holding the artifact. It was
like some kind of anima bomb had gone off.

Humans and nature both produce their own
anima in opposite ways, maybe even some animals theoretically can,
but an
artifact?
It’s not alive and it’s not big enough to
hold reserves, so . . . how? I mean, storage, yeah, we can do that.
It’s mainly what we
do
do. Can even make artifacts that
recharge themselves at miniscule levels, take my Cold Cuffs.
But
there are limits
.

As a simple explanation: think of ice cubes.
If you put water in a tray, then freeze it, you can break out the
cubes and put them in a drink to cool it. But eventually the tray
is empty and you need more water—or anima. The other way, you get a
closed container and fill it with water, freeze it, then put the
container on what you want to cool. Eventually the ice goes back to
water and you have to wait for the water to get freezing again. For
anima this is called open-recharging and closed-recharging. But . .
. the water level stays the same. Nowhere does ice make more ice or
water make more water just on its own.

This . . .

With this thing . . . there was anima
everywhere. To produce this kind of result . . . and it had been in
San Francisco for one-hundred
years
? Making anima the whole
time? For some reason, it also had been made without a limit to
what it could hold, or at least a limit that was mindboggling,
something like thousands of hours of pooling if not more. No wonder
it dripped all over the place, if not used it had nowhere to hold
it all, like some kind of cup that had a water stream which just
wouldn’t stop, eventually what you got was a full cup and a puddle
of water.

And what would that much anima be used
for?

“Jesus Christ fucked a goat . . .” I
whispered, trying to use blasphemy to snap me out of staring at all
the anima like a boy who had just seen his first tit.

“Did not,” Annie B said, standing next to
me.

Moore and her goons remained at the door.
Maybe they were thinking of making a break for it. That or they
didn’t want to be around if something happened with all the
anima.

“Take it you knew him?”

She gave a bitter smile. “Before my time.
Met one of the apostles though. Care to guess which one?”

I grunted. “Don’t suppose you know what
happened to Elvis?”

Annie B stepped into the room and I was
forced for follow. Once more our conversation happened with her
shoulder between us. “He died.”

“Bummer.”

“His corpse sold for a considerable amount
to a very rich duke, however.”

Yeah
. . . maybe conversation was a
worse idea than just being in awe of the room.

I shut up as I studied the area. It was
larger than I’d ever imagined a vault should be. Some real Indiana
Jones, there-might-be-rolling-boulders type crap, only modern, so
the boulders would probably have infrared tracking and a computer
chip or something. Still, it was a circle with a podium raised in
the middle, steps leading up to it and where
something
should have been, there was nothing. Around the
something
, I
felt the geo-anima that had splashed down the steps, on and on as
it had built up into streams that sunk to the sides of the room.
I’d felt mountains with less.

“What is it?” I asked, growling just a bit
of demand at the back of my throat. “We ain’t going further with
this until you tell me more. Payment or not. This ain’t
natural
. It shouldn’t be possible. It’s some dangerous shit,
got it?”

Annie B licked her lips even as Moore,
Sideburns, and Linebacker flinched. “Can you see the anima?”

“Sight’s the wrong word,” I said. “But yeah
. . . I could pool for a year straight and not do this. It’s
everywhere and it’s saturated to a point where it’s thick. I can’t
decide if I’m more confused over the
why
someone would build
it or the
how
someone would build it . . . What is it, Annie
B? No more games.”

“Later,” she said, turning back around to
the other Vamps. “Come inside.”

They did, reluctantly, but I wasn’t getting
passed over for politics. “I’m not joking,
Baroness
, tell me
now or I don’t give you another word, no matter what you pay
me.”

Her hand shot out to clasp around my throat.
Shit
. She pulled me close to her face and there was nothing
I could do about it. Not
this
again. Doesn’t matter if it’s
a beautiful face, I didn’t like being so close to it.

“Cut your tougher-than-everybody act and
trust that I’ll tell you once we’re away from here,
got it
?”
she returned.

“Nervous?” I asked. “We can take them easy .
. .”

Her eyes got older than I’d seen them.
“Fighting only multiplies one’s problems. One day you’ll realize
this.” She shook her head. “One day I will too.”

I would realize it, she’s right, but it was
a great many fights down the road. Even the Asylum didn’t fix that
part of my personality. It was hard to pull back and not throw down
with her. I wanted my answer. Only the geo-anima and the
possibility of it going off by itself if I conjured kept me from
trying something.

“Fine,” I told her. “Make your play, but I
better get some answers soon.”

Annie B released my throat, her hand patting
my shoulder in the way you’d pet a dog. Yup, that’s me. Faithful
companion. Until I shit on the carpet at least. It was Moore that
Annie B spoke to, “As I told you, your geomancer is a coked-out
screw-up.”

“We have only his word,” Moore said,
pointing at me. Like always, I looked like I was guilty of a crime
that didn’t exist yet, but would one day. “He’s hardly a reliable
authority and you said yourself: he isn’t even Guild. What
Artificer
isn’t
Guild?”

“This Artificer,” Annie B answered. “Which
is why I trust him. A good friend endorsed his work, which makes me
trust him even more.” Annie B walked back and forth in front of the
dais looking podium thing. There was a stand made of wood, not
metal—which was probably wise given all the loose anima hanging
around—it had a base and some kind of display with prongs close
together, like it was made to hold a weapon a couple feet long. A
short sword or a club maybe. Annie B paced from it, to the three
San Francisco vampires, then back, repeating the patrol over and
over, studying them all.