The Foul Mouth and the Cat Killing Coyotes (The King Henry Tapes)

by Richard Raley

  All I could do was keep an eye on her, placing my sleeping-bag next to hers, and trying to be a presence at her shoulder. I made her drink some water and got her chewing on some jerky, which on account of being aeromancer she wasn’t too fond of, but at least she didn’t spit it out.

  Sun went bye-bye really quick up in the mountains and without it the temperature started dropping. Colder than the night before, closer to twenty than forty. Pocket got Eva and Nizhoni working up a pair of fires the minute he finished with Welf’s idiocy. Welf sulked, not so different from Miranda, only more angry than scared. Guess Hope would be happy to know she was missed . . . unless it wasn’t Hope he missed . . .

  Son-of-a-bitch, that just clicked for me . . .

  [CLICK]

  Miranda calmed down by the time we all settled in for the night. The two fires were up at each end of our little makeshift sleeping spot beside the road. A few of the boys were given spades and awarded guard duty. They looked more nervous than anyone, but the presence of the girls made them puff those chests and at least pretend.

  The Amazing Power of Pussy!

  Even calm, Miranda wasn’t Val. I can’t call her ugly. She wasn’t good looking but she wasn’t ugly either. She had some figure on her, I’ll give her that. But . . . ginger . . . and glasses . . . and freckles . . . just not my thing.

  “Do you think he’s keeping her warm, King Henry?”

  She did have a nice voice though, with a soft Texas accent. When it wasn’t scolding you at least. I got scolded by Miranda a lot. Not my biggest fan. On the few times we’d been grouped together on class assignments there had been fireworks, and not the pretty kind, more like the kind that accidentally shoot off into the crowd. “Sure, I guess. Probably better off than us.”

  Fires or not, fog boiled from my lips. It looked like I was smoking and for just a second I let myself play the child and imagined it, trying to remember what a cig felt like. I could have used one then. Would have warmed me up some. A cig and Sally to hold onto, snuggling next to that nice pair of plumb . . .

  I studied Miranda.

  “What?” she asked, unsure.

  “You want to like . . . try to get warm? You know . . .”

  Her face went instantly disgusted, the blast of air escaping with her urgh frosting her glasses. “Don’t be gross.”

  “I’m cold, you’re cold . . . just a thought.”

  “Well, stop thinking.”

  People started settling down more. Little Eva Reti kept throwing branches on the fires to keep them strong while Nizhoni worked dirt to create some kind of windbreak around them. Nizhoni is Native American if that’s not clear; Eva is Jewish . . . like, from Israel Jewish. They were friends with Asa, but on account of her being a hydromancer she wanted nothing to do with the fires.

  My eyes drifted, trying to stay awake.

  Some were already asleep, but me . . . werewolves or Samson, I wanted to be ready to throw down.

  Only . . . such a long day . . . fire so warm . . .

  LITTLE MANCER.

  Holy shit.

  It wasn’t in my head like in the dream but written in the dirt beside me.

  Holy shit, I thought again for good measure just before I scuffed the words out of existence with my palm.

  I kept staring at the dirt.

  “You asleep?” Miranda murmured on my other side.

  “No . . . just . . . uh . . . thinking . . . but . . . um . . . not of hugging you or anything.”

  There was an unhappy sniff. “I’d rather freeze,” she murmured.

  LITTLE MANCER.

  I watched in awe as the dirt changed itself letter by letter.

  What did I do? Think at it?

  What?

  Nothing.

  Aloud? “What?” I asked.

  Nothing.

  “What do you mean what?” Miranda asked.

  WHAT? I carefully scrawled in the dirt. “If you’d rather freeze what would it take to get you to snuggle? I have my skills . . .” I tried to distract her.

  Words were already writing themselves.

  “You are so disgusting. No woman would ever want to touch you.”

  BE PREPARED. THEY COME, TONIGHT.

  Holy shit! I thought a third time.

  Just as I was about to write a response another body sat down in the dirt. “I’d let him touch me,” she said.

  This, kiddos, was not a good thing. Any other girl in class: great. Her: not great. Miranda’s right, fourteen-year-old-me is disgusting; he would have even put his thing inside of Hope’s frozen twat if she offered it. His dick would have clanged off like the T-1000’s arm afterward, but he’d have made a try of it. But never with the girl sitting across from him.

  Isabel wasn’t merely ugly, she was . . . just . . . damn . . . sec, I’m trying to keep down throw up . . .

  Okay . . . you know, it’s actually hard to remember what she looked like. By the time she got a hang of being a Faceshifter one week she’d be Megan Fox, the next she’d be pre-drunken slosh Lindsey Lohan, and the next . . . something she’d just make up that was jaw dropping gorgeous. But the real her? Got to sit here for a bit and remember it.

  Right. She had brown hair that curled into a mess. Not dark brown to be lush but light brown that looked frayed and weak as straw. She had a blocky figure and no chest at all, wouldn’t have needed a bra for nothing. A nose too big, taking her cheeks with it, and almost no jaw-line, and definitely no chin. She had moles on a cheek, three of them in a place where just one would have been pretty. A forehead too big, eyebrows too thick and too close together.

  Fourteen-year-old-me flinched at having her scoot up to him. It didn’t help that suddenly Miranda was really enjoying herself. I backed up a few inches to get space away from that face. “I was just teasing, Isabel. I’m not really cold.”

  “Oh . . .” she said. Overbite . . . forgot the overbite. “But I’m cold . . .”

  I thought hard to get out of the problem. “Well, maybe you and Miranda can snuggle to warm up . . .”

  Miranda had stopped enjoying herself. She stared at Isabel, trying to overcome the manners her parents had taught her. “I guess . . . if you got your sleeping-bag we could lean against each other . . .” What I tell you? Teach your kids to be rude and how to read a person, wins out over manners in the end.

  Manners will get you killed one day.

  “Just a minute, I’ll move it!” Isabel hopped off over to the other side of the camp.

  “You better hope Valentine is dead, King Henry,” Miranda told me, “because if she’s alive and if I get to see her again, I’m talking her into burning a hole into you.”

  “Kinky . . . you never know when you’re going to need another hole . . .”

  [CLICK]

  I stood horizontal to the world.

  Down below, trees poked free from the soil that had once belonged to me, the mountain miniaturized, made for the cupping hand. At my neck, the sun floated at perfect noon, directly center in the sky.

  I looked down, or at least, at what to me was down, and found my feet bare, toes tapping against rock. Eat your heart out, Spider-Man. Above, a pebble shook loose from wind and down it went, pulled swiftly past my ear.

  Also above came the voice I’d learned as Meteyos.

  DID YOU NOT UNDERSTAND MY WARNING, LITTLE MANCER?

  “Am I asleep?” I asked, eyes taking in a valley below. There was a river and animals, snow and ice. No cars. No roads. No people. Chillingly quiet, filled only by birdsong and breezes strong enough to scour skin raw. “I fell asleep?”

  FELL? I WOULD WATCH YOUR WORDS, LITTLE MANCER.

  I turned around, valley at my back, sun ahead. Under the sun was my vertical world, a sheered cliff face for thousands of feet. Across it geo-anima flowed, welling from someplace deep, forming lines of power. I could feel my own anima type but it might as well have been necro or floro for all I could do with it. This geo-anima was under another’s management. It wanted nothing to do with a ge
omancer.

  “I’m dreaming again . . . and of your crumbling ass again, fairy.”

  INSOLENCE. I COULD DROP YOU TO YOUR DEATH WITH A THOUGHT.

  “We’re in a dream.”

  SO SURE? THERE ARE MORE PLACES A MANCER CAN STUMBLE THAN YOU HAVE EVER IMAGINED.

  “We’re in a dream,” I repeated. To show how reckless I could be, I jumped into the air and landed back on the mountainside. “Ta-fucking-da! Not dead.”

  The lines of geo-anima converged together near where my feet came down, forming . . . a face. A face of brownish power, wisps faded along its cheeks, lighting its eyes, crackling over its forehead. Whole, it was probably twice the size of my body.

  YOU SHOULD NOT BE HERE.

  “Better than freezing my ass off back in the real world. Why Miranda got to be so stuffy? I’d have been a gentleman, would have kept my hands away from anything important.”

  A LIE.

  “Well . . . okay, maybe a hip. Got to check and see, ya know?”

  THE WIND IS NOT OUR FRIEND. IT IS AN ENEMY.

  “I don’t know . . . I like Ceinwyn. She’s cool.”

  FIRE TO SUPPORT US. SUN TO WARM US. SHADE TO COOL US. DEATH TO GIVE COMPANY. BUT NOT WIND.

  “Come on, even a mountain has to have itself a little tickle every now and then.”

  NEVER WIND.

  “Don’t see why you merit an opinion on my currently non-existent sex life.”

  THE GIRL OF FIRE PERHAPS.

  “Oh . . . yeah . . . Valentine, I mean . . . yeah . . . she um, still alive, by the way?”

  FOR NOW.

  “Good . . .”

  THEY ARE COMING FOR MORE OF YOU AS YOU SLEEP, LITTLE MANCER.

  “Shit. It Samson doing this or it really werewolves? Fill me in on the fairy 411, Meta Yo-Yo.”

  THEY MEAN TO CAPTURE AND TRAP YOU. THEY MEAN TO BRING YOU TOGETHER AND MOCK YOU.

  “Double shit. I need to wake up.”

  TRUST IN US AND WE WILL HELP YOU. RUN. RUN THE MOMENT YOU WAKE. DON’T PAUSE FOR A SINGLE SECOND. LOOK FOR HELP AMONG THE ROCKS AND SOIL.

  “But how do I wake up?”

  YOU FALL.

  And just like that my feet were free of the mountain. I hung for a bare second, then I hurtled downwards, trees at my back waiting to impale me, sun above without any comment on my passing. But the face of the mountain . . . the face of the mountain laughed.

  [CLICK]

  I was up and standing on my feet before my eyes had a chance to open. When they did it was to nothing but dark woods, the twin fires managing to coat the world in orange.

  I glanced down, saw Miranda and Isabel. Just above their heads . . . words scraped in the dirt. DON’T PAUSE FOR A SINGLE SECOND.

  “Shit’s like being in the Matrix,” I grumbled before diving down to grab both Isabel and Miranda.

  Shows you how scared everyone was that they didn’t immediately punch me in the balls. “Up!” I yelled at them, then at the camp in general, “They’re coming! Get the fuck out of here!”

  I’d just finished the last word when the first howl sounded. Neither Isabel nor Miranda needed any coaxing to their feet. “Come on!” I told them, dragging each by the arm.

  Around us, kids bolted out of sleeping-bags. The kids declared guards hefted spades and sticks, searching for something to hit.

  More howls.

  Screams from the girls. Cursing from the guys.

  “Run!” a first voice.

  “Stay and fight!” a second voice.

  “Run!” to the two girls I’d been saddled with.

  I looked for Pocket, for a word, or a glance, or anything, but there was no time.

  Don’t pause for a second.

  Didn’t need to tell me a third time.

  Session 118

  “This is the place?” I asked T-Bone.

  He nodded.

  Staring across the street I couldn’t believe what I saw with my own two eyes. “How can the same shit happen to the same guy twice?”

  T-Bone was rightly confused, not having been around for the crazy vampire community lake bullshit the last go-around. “Huh?”

  “Motherfucking mansions . . . why the fuck it always got to be motherfucking mansions?” I waved at the buildings around where T-Bone had parked his car on the side of the road. My finger ended pointing especially at our target. “And fucking walls, man . . . fuck walls with a trebuchet throwing some dead God-damned cows. Stanky, moldy dead fucking cows.”

  “That was a lot of cursing even for you, King Henry.”

  “Fucking walls . . .”

  They were a good ten feet in height, made of stone and overrun with ivy at the top. Just in reach, maybe, but ivy ain’t a rope and ten feet ain’t the vertical for most people not playing in the NBA. Would have taken one of those crazy Ninja Warrior bastards to climb those walls. Not my short ass and not T-Bone’s three-hundred-pound ass.

  If you turned your head to either side there were more mansions, with some serious yards to them, but not walls. Huge trees and sculpted bushes and some lawn art that said ‘I’m rich, bitch’. But not walls. I’d only been in Fresno for a couple years and hadn’t been into much exploration, but even I knew Van Ness is where you found the rich people. Real estate developers, doctors, lawyers, and Horatio Vega, King of the Coyote Nation.

  It’s the vampire community all over again.

  Forget me, how could one shitty city in a shitty valley have so much weird crap going on in it?

  “Know the problem with walls?” I asked, shaking my head at the heap of dinosaur-sized crap the Mancy had put in front of me.

  T-Bone kept checking his smart-phone. Probably hoping that Ceinwyn would call and threaten him into stop helping me. Didn’t matter. I’d gotten what I needed. T-Bone did good work. I’d gotten a list of addresses associated to Vega’s name. Long fucking list. Rich bastard. He owned property all over Fresno, all over Fresno County too with a bunch all clumped together in the foothills going towards the mountains. Gee, wonder what he grew up there?

  Still . . . got what I needed or not, it was good to have the only other Ultra in town with me. Shit turned real I could use some lightning bolts up some Coyote furry assholes. Plus . . . I didn’t like to admit it, but he was the only reason I hadn’t killed someone back at my shop with those machineguns going off. If I hadn’t been worrying about keeping him from getting shot . . . might have taken a bullet just to break Suit’s skull.

  My moral conscience put down his phone, finally giving his thoughts on walls. “They’re . . . tall?”

  “The problem with walls is gates. Know what the problem with gates is?”

  Yeah, Vega owned some property. Probably owned more than what’s on paper too. That’s the way the movies say criminals do it, got to be true. A long list to look through, but . . . Van Ness . . . everyone in Fresno knows that’s where the rich people are at. Where else I going to find a king?

  “They . . . keep people out?”

  “Exactly,” I snarled, studying me some wall and metal gate both. The gate had initials at the top . . . HV. Had to be the place. Had to be. “We don’t got us a clue what’s going on behind those gates. We go in, we go in blind. All them knights back in the medieval days, they knew what defense really came down to. Comes down to walls. All them armies that broke back in the day, know when they broke, T-Bone? They broke when they actually got over that wall . . . and they saw another fucking wall they didn’t know about.”

  T-Bone frowned over this logic. “I think it might have been the burning oil and arrows . . .”

  “Nah, those are just obstacles . . . like getting sick or your car breaking down. People like to ignore the obstacles, focus in on the big things, them big goals. That’s what a wall is, big goal to get over. Like college or marriage or retirement, big life goal. Work hard for it, got it beat, then . . . it all looks like shit on the other side. That’s when people break . . .”

  T-Bone started to get alarmed. “Please don’t Jericho the w
alls . . . I think they’ll notice that.”

  “You’re right.” I glanced down the street, took in the cars going by.

  All that time spent with the police and then the sheriff’s had eaten us into morning. Everyone in Fresno was getting ready and leaving for a day of work. Not Casa de Vega though, that place didn’t move at all. It just said: wall, bitches.

  “About what?”

  “We need a distraction.”

  “I don’t like the sound of that either . . .”

  “And we need to be sneaky.”

  “Better . . .”

  “We need to get over the wall in a way that we have time to figure our bearings. Who knows what’s behind there? Pool? Guesthouse? Coyote pits? Could be anything.”

  T-Bone pulled out his phone again, flipping to something. “King Henry . . . you’ve heard of Google maps, right?”

  Casa de Vega looked all naked, butt-cheeks sagging and holding its limp cock in a spare hand once satellites got done with it. A guesthouse at the back, a pool, and a basketball court. At least JoJo would be a wealthy widow once I finished my business with her husband. I don’t even know what he looks like but I can still imagine his nose breaking . . .

  T-Bone expanded the image on the phone, zooming to a section near the walls. “That’s where we should go over. The guesthouse will screen us from anyone in the yard.”

  “Someone’s been playing too much Call of Duty.”

  “I wish you’d stop with the video game jokes, it’s not like every time you make a comment about punching someone I say something about Fight Night, is it?”

  “Wait . . . they make boxing video games?”

  “Oh Mancy, what have I done?”

  “Do they make MMA video games too?”

  “You do remember about the werecoyotes we need to deal with, yes?”

  I just stared at him. “You really need to work on your tension releasing snappy dialogue; you could learn a thing or two from Annie B . . .”

  “You keep mentioning her.”

  “She made an impression . . .”

  “I’ve never met a vampire.”

  “They make an impression . . .”