“Feedback is minimal, mostly a tingle of static in your fingers, nothing serious. I’d take it off before you play with your computers and game systems though.”
“Oh . . . sounds like a good warning.” T-Bone worked as a computer consultant for about twenty different companies around the Valley, called in to help them with their security setups. In the oldest days, Stormcallers were left doing lightning rod duty before Benjamin Franklin came along to invent the more permanent version of a metal shaft, then it was work for power companies and Edison regulating flows. Now that the world runs off the 1 and 0’s of binary code, the question ain’t ‘what can Stormcallers do?’ it is ‘what can’t Stormcallers do?’
“And the activation?” he asked.
“Anima burst, no matter the Mancy.”
His face went frown. “Isn’t that dangerous? Accidents happen.”
“It was the biggest problem after I figured out the how of it,” I explained to alleviate any fears of an accidental discharge frying your poodle. “Hair trigger and you’re zapping yourself every time some heavy emotion makes you bleed anima, too tough and you’re left with the same problem we all face: got to sit around on your ass building anima up while bad shit is happening to you.”
“So what did you settle on?”
“Five seconds,” I said.
“Better than five minutes.”
“Sixty times better last I checked.”
He put his hand out to shake. The hand with the ring on it despite the fact it was the left one and T-Bone’s a righty.
I flipped him off.
It made T-Bone smile, his teeth a flash of white against his dark lips. Guy had a big smile. “I had to try, old electric finger gag.”
“It’s not a toy,” I reminded him.
Problem with growing up middle class is you don’t realize the world will smack you in the face. You think it’s okay to play around. T-Bone is a good guy. He just needs a smack. Usually the Asylum provides a few, but for T-Bone, he went through in a year known for its easy-going kids who got along. He didn’t have a Welf. Or even a Soto. A whole class of Maliks . . . how boring . . .
“I know, I know,” he said, but I could tell he was going to zap someone with it like it was a practical joke. Well . . . as long as it wasn’t me, why should I give a crap? That’s some King Henry wisdom right there.
He pulled out his wallet with a raised eyebrow. “Cash?”
Cash.
I remembered what cash looked like. Sometimes the old ladies gave me some of it. I’d yet to get paid money for my Artificer work. All trades. Creation for anima. Copies for myself. Anima vials to build other stuff. Imagine trying to build a table that takes thirteen different types of wood and all you have in your own backyard is a tree of one type. That’s what it’s like being an Artificer free from the Guild. I needed anima worse than I needed cash. Ceinwyn owned my future already. What’s another million?
When I pulled out an anima containment vial from under the register, T-Bone gave me a big grin. He put out his thumb and stuck it to the metal top of the vial. I felt the flash of anima drain from him and into it, trapped by the Artificer’s gift. “I know you so well I was saving up.”
I shrugged. “I need to make more rings, means I need more anima. It’s the way it works.”
“Yeah, I know.” Turning his eyes away from mine he stayed silent for a bit, before he seemed to come to a conclusion about the quality of my product. “If you give me like . . . twenty-five percent on their sells? I can donate to you about once a week. Maybe twice if it’s light at work.”
Hell . . . every once in a while even King Henry Price sees the sun through the gray. How about that?
“Sounds great, T-Bone.”
“Don’t call me that, King Henry.”
“Want to shake on it?”
He studied my static ring. “How long has it been on your finger charging up?”
I smirked. Only thing to do when you get caught. “Since I opened the store.”
“Right . . . think I’m going to take off then and do without the ambulance.”
“New video game?” I asked.
I can’t be sure since this is all by memory, but if I had to guess it was likely a Tuesday. T-Bone would always come into my shop and then go get his newest video games that just came out. Sometimes I’d even go back to his place with him and play some myself, try to forget about anima and artificing for a few hours, but that was in the future. That particular day he just nodded. “Always,” he told me.
Then we shook hands.
The ones without the rings.
Session 2
Ceinwyn Dale gave my excited little ass a whole day to ‘settle my affairs’. She just might have been mocking me and the girlfriend with that word usage.
What amazes me most looking back is how quickly my jaded little ass took up the idea of the Institution of Elements as being a great place to go to. I suppose it’s similar to the amazement you see on the faces of kids, no matter how abused or screwed up they may be, when they get to go to the zoo for the first time. Something about the wonder in newness, the joy of the unexplainable, as if the Mancy or watching a lion can fix all that’s wrong with the world. Hope . . . they call that word. Or I suppose I might not be as much of a badass as I thought I was. Whatever the reason, for the first time in my messed up life I was interested in something other than stealing, smoking, fighting, or fucking, and I threw myself into not screwing it up.
After Ceinwyn Dale left with her paperwork—and my soul tied up in a nice set of strings—Dad made dinner. Some kind of stir-fry with bright veggies and big pieces of fat marbled beef. Peppery enough to burn your lips. I’ve always had a thing for pepper. Mom made margaritas. Dad had one in place of his usual nightly joint. Not enough to get him drunk or mean, luckily for me.
We talked.
About how it was a good chance for me. About how I had to behave myself and watch my mouth, about how if I was good, Ceinwyn Dale said they’d let me come home in the summer and Dad would come pick me up.
My parents might as well have asked me to shit gold-foil origami cranes, but after all the talk Ceinwyn Dale had fed them, how the Asylum was a remedial school with hard-nosed but caring outlooks, complete with enough bullshit statistics to make my brain hurt like I’d gulped a gallon of slushie, it was expected to get some parenting for once. Mom ended the forced lovefest with, “time for bed, King Henry Price,” already tipsy and eyeing my father’s wide shoulders like she had a habit of doing when particular thoughts were circulating inside her head.
And I went to bed. Smoked a last cig for the day. Probably whacked one out too. Gross, horny teenagers and their nasty impulses. Disgusting, eh? Was probably thinking about Ceinwyn Dale when I did it too. What, you were expecting a glass of water and a bed time story?
[CLICK]
Mom woke me up the next day to get ready for school. To which I responded, most of my goodwill already gone from the night before, “Why the fuck I want to go to school when I’m not going there no more?”
“You don’t want to say goodbye to your friends?” Mom asked. Another ‘Good Day’. Two in a row.
I thought about my friends. Yeah. Guys-that-bet-on-me-to-score-cash is a better term. “Not really. They won’t give a shit.”
“No little ladies to break hearts with goodbyes?” I hadn’t told her about the girlfriend. But then, she occasionally was the one who washed the clothes, so she might have figured out something was going on when she smelled the sex and cheap-teenage-girl perfume on them.
“Nope, not really,” I lied.
Mom pouted at me. Big curvy lips worked wonders for her and she always liked to pout to get her way. Even though she was closing in on forty. Especially since she was closing in on forty. “I still have to sign you out of the school, King Henry Price.”
Well . . . shit. She had me there.
I dressed. Jeans. T-shirt with a pro-wrestler on it this time. It might have been ‘fake’ bu
t there was blood and big-breasted women, and that made it okay in my book. Wallet with twenty bucks in it I’d stolen from my math teacher’s purse earlier in the week. House keys I wouldn’t need after that day. A mouth freshener spray-can. And that was it. No knife. Like Ceinwyn Dale noticed, I got off on the impact of a punch. Also no cell-phone—not enough money made at Shithole Price to waste it on text messaging.
Mom dressed too. Dress, makeup, her dark hair done up real nice. It really sucks having a hot mom.
An example of this being when we got into the principal’s office and he flirted with her the whole time she signed more papers to get me off the school rolls all while Mr. Brett hoped to get Mom out of her dress.
“Really, Mrs. Price, it’s no problem at all.”
“I’d hoped not.”
“A very simple process.”
“I’ve always found it easy too . . .”
While he was distracted by my mother’s hips, tits, and lips, I launched a preemptive attack by stealing Mr. Brett’s car keys and his flash drive hanging half out of his pocket. What was he going to do, expel me? I doubted Ceinwyn Dale would care. I wasn’t stupid—uneducated sure, but I could put two and two together and her little tricks and my lucky accidents were linked.
When Mr. Brett finished drooling at my mom we left, King Henry Price officially off the rolls of Redwood High. Free at last! Free at last! Strings be cut! Strings be cut!
But not quite.
“Now we go home, right?”
“I’m thinking about doing some shopping.”
“Like . . . what kind of shopping?”
Mom’s smile told me she wasn’t done with me yet.
Ceinwyn Dale assured my parents that the Institution of Elements would take care of my clothing needs, since everyone wore uniforms—real Commie Kim Jung Il shit—but Mom felt the need to spend some of my father’s hard earned money at the Visalia Mall trying to get me a suitcase, grooming kit, shavers, stuff like that. We actually had a pretty good time, considering.
The biggest problem with Mom’s ‘Good Days’ is that she’s happy during them. That might seem ass-backwards but imagine someone being a total crank to you probably three-hundred days a year, at best they could be zombiefied and care less if you existed. But for the other sixty-five days, at random, they love you. Completely—with no reserve. And they don’t understand why you don’t love them back, or why you’re mad, since for some reason they can’t remember being a cranky zombie.
That’s a ‘Good Day’.
It gets real hard to forget all the crap and be nice after awhile. Mom had been having ‘Good Days’ for over half my life, so it was extra hard to forget by then, but since it’s the last time I’d have to do it for awhile, I gave it a shot and had some fun shopping with my mom, even when she tried to embarrass me in Victoria’s Secret.
“What ‘bout this one?”
“This is child endangerment or something.”
“How dare I treat you like a grown-up . . .”
“Mom, I could be fifty and I wouldn’t want to hear about your lingerie.”
“How ‘bout this one?”
Mostly I tried to make accidents happen. I thought at the time that Ceinwyn Dale’s hinting screwed my luck up . . . that actually knowing what was going on, about the Mancy, completely shut me down. One of those ‘only invisible when no one is looking’ things. In reality, fourteen-year-old-me pushed around anima like a pyromancer would and the geomancer juices got all blocked up worse than a week’s constipation.
Ignition versus solidity.
After I had my travel goods—complete with a few new comics that had actually been bought for my car trip—and Mom had some new skimpy things I tried not to think about, we stopped by the food court and gorged some sodas and burgers.
“So are you excited, honey?” Mom asked.
“I guess . . .”
“New place, new friends . . . new girls . . .” she teased me.
“I don’t think that’s what this Institution of Elements place is about, Mom.”
“It’s a school, honey; schools always have girls and friends. Provided you don’t beat them up and get kicked out.” Hmm. This was a serious realization for little shit me. No fighting. No fighting. And if I did get in a fight we’d both probably be mancers. I got so excited at the thought I think I popped a boner—and one of those just-woke-up-from-sleeping-can-cut-metal boners too. Either that or it was me watching the lemonade girl with a tight shirt pushing up and down on her wooden masher stick.
Hard call.
“I’ll try to be good, Mom.”
“I know you will, honey.”
We ate in silence for a bit before Mom opened up. “I know it hasn’t been easy on you. Your sisters leaving . . . your father working more hours and me getting . . . well . . . it’s been hard on you. Lots of kids would have turned out much worse from less, and . . . I’m proud of you, King Henry.”
I tried so damn hard to be tough and not start crying. I couldn’t keep it all in. My eyes leaked like broken facets . . . drip, drip, drip. These tiny tears that just collected up on my cheeks and wouldn’t fall. Part of it was being happy that maybe deep down Mom actually knew what it’s like to live with her, part of it was pure burning anger that she fucking dared to give me a speech after all those years of crap.
The emotion shifted some anima around in a purely stone-hard, rock-solid, geomancer kind of way and a fat guy sitting down on the other side of the food court with a pair of cheeseburgers got a nasty surprise when his metal stuck-to-the-table chair broke clean away from the table half of the equation.
Mom mistook the look of shock on my face for something having to do with her and stepped over to give me a hug. “I’m going to miss my little man, honey.”
The fat guy got up with soda all over him, throwing a pudgy kick at the broken chair like it was at fault. Amazing. “Yeah, Mom, I’ll miss you too.”
Fifty-fifty on if that was a lie or not. I guess I don’t know how I felt, or how I feel even today. Hard things emotions. We keep them so bottled up, they mix and combine like alchemic elixirs and become feelings we don’t even have words for. Yearning for something else. But I didn’t have a name for it.
“You promise to write me?”
I nodded my head. Now that was a lie.
[CLICK]
I’d had about as much Mom Time as I could handle, so when we got home I locked myself in my room, packing. Packing was pretty much taking all the new stuff I had and throwing it in the equally new suitcase. I added some extra comics just in case the car ride to the Institution of Elements place was really long, change of clothes too . . . just to be sure I didn’t arrive naked.
Hell if I knew how to pack.
I’d only been on one overnight trip in my life—to my grandma’s when I was five, and only to Fresno. Hour ride, whoop-tee-do. We didn’t even know anything was wrong with Mom then . . . Dad had just called her ‘fiery’.
Mom sat at the couch, being fiery with a rum and coke when I finally left my room. 3PM. Late start for Mom. “You all packed, honey?”
“Yeah,” I mumbled while pouring myself a coke sans rum.
“Miss Dale called.” Mom was watching a soap opera. I wonder how many women have been turned into alcoholics by soap operas over the years? Maybe they should have a warning sign like cigarettes.
“What she say?” There’s something inherently scary behind the thought that Ceinwyn Dale had my phone number.
“Just wanted to make sure you were being good and not running away. Nice woman.”
“Still here . . .”
“I see that, honey.”
“Actually, Mom, I think you were right, I’m going to go ride and say goodbye to my friends.”
“Just friends?”
“Mom!”
“A mother can hope, can’t she?”
I pulled my bike out of the garage and headed for the girlfriend’s. My bike had come via hand-me-down from my middle sister—Jord
an Josephine Price, Mom sure could name them—and it was a girly bike. Pink. At first I’d planned to repaint it with spiders and snakes and guy stuff, but after awhile I saw the upside. Pink bike? More reason for fights! Besides, with all the mud caked on it you could hardly tell.
The girlfriend greeted me at her door after I’d checked to see if her mom was working. The girlfriend is named Sally. She was taller than me by about five inches, had black hair she always kept in a ponytail, and had big tits. Which is what fourteen-year-old-me really liked about her. I was deep back then. To be fair, I also liked that her house was in a better part of town and was clean.
She and her mom lived without a man around, prison followed by abandonment, but the United States government stepped in to help out and it was a very nice little house. Complete with air conditioning. Glorious, glorious AC. We had vents at school but being in a stuffy class ain’t the same as sitting in front of a pouring stream of cold air during the summer time.
Tell you the truth, fourteen-year-old-me could never figure out what Sally saw in him. She got decent grades, had friends she didn’t beat up every other time she saw them and I wasn’t much of a catch looks wise. I’m not an ugly guy outside of a broken nose, but I’m not handsome either, and fuck, man, I was just around the upside of five feet tall.
Besides her big tits I liked that she liked me. That was the crux of what I liked about Sally. Big tits, nice house with AC, and liked me for some unknown reason. Fucking deep.
Twenty-one-year-old me could fill fourteen-year-old-me in on some info, like how Sally became a stripper working for some bad people, and that she had some serious daddy insecurity issues that left her seeking out the baddest, toughest guy she could find to shack up with, and at the time . . . hello, King Henry Price, you pugnacious little shit. But since twenty-one-year-old me doesn’t have a time machine, fourteen-year-old-me was screwed and left in a cave of wonder regarding Sally.
The Foul Mouth and the Fanged Lady Page 4
