The Foul Mouth and the Fanged Lady (19 page)

Linebacker spoke up after a bit of unnerving
silence, “So our geomancer barely noticed the anima and couldn’t
track it, so what? Just because the little shit can see it or sense
it or whatever he does, it doesn’t mean he can track wherever the
item went any more than our guy could.”

“You’re wasting our time,” Sideburns agreed,
backing up his boy. “Just let it go. It had to be a vampire who
took it if they defeated the blood scanner, which means they can’t
use it. Let them have it and deal with the consequences instead of
San Francisco. Good riddance.”

Annie B was more like some tiger as she
walked back and forth, not human. If she’d had fur it would have
been standing on end. Even her dark hair seemed bristled. “Are they
right, King Henry? Can you track it?”

I looked over the room again. The thing
about the anima surrounding me is that it made me feel funny. If
you’re going to compare it to another sense, it didn’t smell like
the anima I was used to. Like someone had taken normal anima and
distilled it and what I got was a smell of the strong vapors cast
off. That beat of movement under my feet felt different than my own
anima or the anima in nature. It
was
unique.
Somewhere in
between them
, I thought. But that didn’t mean I could follow
it.

“No. I’d know it if I felt it again thought.
Maybe even if I got close to it. It’s . . .
different
.”

Moore and her goons seemed to relax. For
being probably hundreds of years old, they were surprisingly bad at
hiding their guilt. You could read them like a bad novel, all gushy
and open, telling you what’s going on.

They didn’t steal it for themselves, that
much was obvious. But they’d wanted the thing
gone
. Feeling
all the strange anima, I couldn’t help but see their point of view.
Whatever did that . . . I’m an Artificer and I didn’t even want to
be in a room with it. No matter what it could do.
Make the Earth
crack in two maybe . . .

“Are you sure?” Annie B asked.

“It’s not like I’m a damned dog and the
smell sticks around. Anima doesn’t work that way. Fuck, anima ain’t
supposed to work
this way
. But it’s not like there’s some
line to follow. I can tell you it’s been in this room. I can tell
you if I walked into a room with it. I can tell you if I sat in a
car carrying it. I can . . .” I stopped, frowning.

Shit
.

So much for not fighting.

“What?” Annie B asked again, gaze gone old
again.

“I can tell you Sideburns held the thing,
it’s all over his hands,” I said, with a dreadful certainty I had
killed the guy, but with not even a clue as to how horrible it was
going to be. I mean, I didn’t like the guy, he was a douchebag
really . . . and he did steal it from the room and get it out of
San Francisco probably, which wasn’t very loyal to his Embassy, but
he didn’t deserve the hand he got dealt. No one deserves that hand
. . .

Annie B sprung at Sideburns with a speed I’d
never seen from her, even in our fights. Sideburns reacted with
fists, trying to smash her flat, but she dodged. He was twice her
size at least, shoulder muscles bigger than my head. But she’s
older by centuries, with years added on years to make her shell
into a more perfect home.

Not a fair fight.

Her fists cracked out, stunning him with
three punches before I could even react enough to keep an eye on
Linebacker and Moore. Neither threatened us, luckily enough. They
only backed away from the fight, glad it wasn’t them and horrified
of where it headed. They knew what I didn’t yet. If I had, I might
have kept my mouth shut.

Sideburns managed to grab onto Annie B’s
quick form even as she rammed a knee into his balls. I’ve already
mentioned vampires can turn off pain receptors, but they have to be
smart enough to turn them off. Sideburns took the knee before he
seemed to remember he could do it. In that whole second, his body
bent over and he completely screwed himself. A whole second—could
have been
forever
.

He had no chance.

Grabbing his face, Annie B did the last
thing I expected—I was expecting her to snap his neck—instead she
kissed him. A deep, I’m-going-to-suck-out-your-organs kind of
kiss—locked on like she never planned to let go. Only it wasn’t
tongue she gave him.

It was
her
.

In that instant of realization of what she
was doing, sliding a piece of herself into his body to fight him
vampire to vampire instead of shell to shell, I had a sick feeling
of flashback to the rope of blood wrapped around my neck, of the
wound on my hand I had thankfully been too knocked out to
remember.

Fuck me
.

Human, vampire, everyone in the vault
screamed or gasped or grunted at what Annie B did as she grabbed at
Sideburn’s body, feet knocking him to the floor even as she kept
their mouths locked together. “Tell me,” she mumbled, barely
understandable from the corners of her lips as she pressed them
against his.

Sideburn screamed a sound that was nothing
human. It came from deep inside him. Not his lungs pushing air
through his throat, but the real him deep in his body, likely in
his heart—screaming vibrations—and the sound carried out to the air
surrounding us.

Fuck me
.

“Tell me,” Annie B said again, wrapping legs
around his chest as he stopped struggling, in too much pain to
order his shell to fight back. “Where?” He only screamed again. It
took me the second scream to realize she was eating him alive.
“
Who took it
? I’ll make it quick if you tell me where?” she
asked like her tongue talked around a rope.

Big bad tough Linebacker threw up.
Gentlewoman Moore ran out of the room, eyes streaming tears. Yeah,
if I was smart I probably would have too. But I’m not smart. Only I
stood there watching every bit of the drama as Annie B kept asking
the question, punctuated by a scream for each bite she took of him.
Imagine every National Geographic show you’ve ever seen and then
times the wildebeest going down to a lion by a hundred, then maybe
you’ve got the same feeling, except it was happening right in front
of you and not through several layers of camera.

“Where is it?” she asked again.

He finally answered. With the last word I
ever wanted to hear. “Fresno!”

“
Who? The duke?
”

“Don’t know . . .”

There was a final long scream before
Sideburns gave up on even shaking, going all corpse on us much
quicker than a human would. Annie B grasped at it for a moment,
legs and arms tight around him like a snake, before they relaxed.
She gave a little content sigh, the same all-filled-up-on-food sigh
that’s universal across cultures and apparently species too.

Finished with her meal, the man’s huge body
dropped down to the floor in front of her as she let go. Annie B
turned around to smile at me. Her face around her lips was red with
what I hoped was just blood but knew probably wasn’t.

“I don’t suppose your teachers taught you
we’re cannibals?” A quiver of enjoyment hung heavy in her voice.
“Only we taste better to each other than humans . . . it’s a perk
of my job.” Something red, thin, and flexible poked from her mouth
to wipe the last of the blood away from her lips and it wasn’t her
tongue.

“Nope, hadn’t heard about that one.”

I guess you could call it my first school
field trip. Not really. We didn’t leave the grounds, and there were
lots and lots of grounds—they weren’t even fenced. Shocking, I
know. You think they’d at least do it to protect the public from
us. My first field trip actually happened about a month later, if
thirty teenagers running around in the wild—alone—without adult
supervision, trying not be eaten by a mountain lion or kill one
another with an accidental anima discharge—technical term—counts as
a field trip.

The grounds of the Asylum are big. Plenty of
room to get lost in or to find a nice quiet place to be alone, even
with the three or four-thousand people that live there. It’s like a
small town. With lots of crazy people in it.

Looking down at it like a flying bird—or a
floating Winddancer—you’d see a horseshoe shaped road, big enough
for two lanes of cars, one way in and out. The four sections of the
Asylum are all named as they relate to the horseshoe on the
foundation map. West, East, Center, Top. Why Top and not North? I
always wondered too.

West Section was where I started the
day.

The teacher houses are pretty much all of
what makes up West and there’s quite a lot of them in a suburban
grid, like they’ve been transplanted straight from my hometown of
Visalia. Exiting Ceinwyn Dale’s house and taking it in was a huge
disappointment . . . trust me.

Well into the day, some of my teachers were
already up and about doing normal neighbor things. There were even
children out too. They played in the streets. I often think how
strange it must be to grow up like that, knowing what the Mancy is
from the start, living not so far from all the students. Even worse
on those who didn’t have the Mancy. Wives, husbands, even kids.
They’re essentially useless for the purpose of the place. Yet they
stayed around. They even had normal school for the kids.
Kindergarten at the Asylum. Kick me in the balls if they weren’t
tailor made to turn out psychopaths.

The Gullick house was particularly busy that
day as Ceinwyn Dale and I walked by. It had a sign.
House
Gullick
. There were flowers painted on it. Pretty pink
ones.

Ceinwyn Dale waved at a man mowing the lawn.
Mowing the fucking lawn
. He waved back and yelled, “New
one?”

She nodded, not glancing my way. Woman with
a purpose. Might be she was trying to save me from my big mouth by
walking quick.

There were kids my age playing basketball in
the driveway.
Playing basketball in the fucking driveway
.
Unlike Ceinwyn Dale, a few of them looked my way then. Mancers the
lot.

One of the girls yelled out, “How strong is
he?”

“Not tested, Naomi, and that question is
rude,” Ceinwyn Dale told her. “You know better.”

“
Come on
, Miss Dale! He’s already
wearing the colors, I’m just curious,” Naomi Gullick pouted as we
walked by. Naomi was always a bit self-important over the years.
Like she knew more than all the others since she grew up at the
place.

Looking at that pout, knowing a few spoiled
teachers kids in my fourteen years, I had myself an accidental
anima discharge. Could they have thought of a dirtier sounding
technical term? My dirty term broke the pole of the basketball
court right in half.
Crack
. Damn thing clanged down with a
thud.

Fatality.

King Henry wins.

“That strong, honey, maybe you get a taste
sometime,” I yelled back. Maybe if I’d known her father would be my
Elementalism
teacher for four years, I wouldn’t have. Say
what you will about King Henry Price, he knows how to make a good
first impression.

Once we turned down another street, Ceinwyn
Dale finally asked me, “Did you do that on purpose?”

“Still mad about the wall art?”

“You need to stop breaking things.”

“It was an accident.” I added a bit of
probably the most insight I’d had in a while, “I don’t like people
talking about me like I’m a measuring stick or something.”

Ceinwyn Dale smiled for the first time that
trip. “You’re going to be such a nice change of pace, King Henry.
This place needs it. The last few classes have gotten too
complacent.”

“You’re doing it to me, you know . . .”

“Yes, but you like it when
I
do
it.”

“You mean I put up with it because you can
kick my ass.”

“Either works.”

We eventually crossed over a busy road
filled with unmarked windowless buses. The setup is that parents
dropped the kids off at a predestinated station in Tahoe and then
the drivers ferried them in. Kept the Asylum free of sobbing
parents and equally sobbing students. It also kept the exact
location of the Asylum a bit of a mystery. So Ceinwyn Dale wasn’t
lying about drugging me with a giant needle.

Center Section is the corrupted heart of the
place. It’s always busy, beating away, even the day before class
starts. Once class is actually in session, it would be packed for
twelve hours a day, six days a week for the next eleven months. It
had the Employee Dorms, plus the Single and Bi Dorms—one building
according to the fact that freshmen of all kinds have to get the
worst treatment, even magical freshmen—but the main workhorses are
the classroom buildings. One for normal school classes any kids are
going to get and another for anima classes, which only the unlucky
have to put up with. Like me.

I’d grow to hate those rooms. Especially
room M108—my math room for four years of arithmetic, algebra, and
geometry. In case you’re wondering about my feelings on those
subjects . . . fuck algebra and double fuck geometry. Arithmetic I
can live with . . . I need it for anima conversion formulas. But in
case you didn’t hear me correctly the first time:
double fuck
geometry
.

There is also the Cafeteria, which ended up
one of my favorite buildings during my stay. Good ass food for
three meals a day. No running in to steal breakfast before heading
to school or packing my raggedy backpack with enough snacks to get
me through my weekends away from my drunk parents. No more square
school pizza. That’s some vile junk. Square school pizza disproves
socialism more than any political argument ever did.

Those are the buildings but Center Section
also holds the Park, which is pretty much a park in the middle of
the school. Trees, bushes, ponds, more bushes, and nooks for some
privacy that led to plenty of awkward situations—nothing like being
found making out with a cute floromancer girl by your
Languages
teacher. Jethro Smith. Thinks he’s a rock star.
Bastard started to give me advice.