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.
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.”
Session 5
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.
The Foul Mouth and the Fanged Lady Page 14
