The Foul Mouth and the Cat Killing Coyotes (The King Henry Tapes) (25 page)

Words followed the scream, “Please, don’t hurt me!  Please, I’ll do anything!”

I pushed forward, grabbed the . . .
girl
. . . by the shoulder and carried her into what light there was.  Long hair, cute face.  Floromancer colors of green and brown.  Skinny but a lot going on.  Taller than me, of course, but not by a lot.  “
Naomi?
” I asked.

I don’t know which of us was more shocked.  “
King Henry?”

My eyes drifted down to the
man
, finding the same floromancer colors. 
Nice one, you just gut punched your best friend
.

Suit’s mansion burned like a roaring inferno.  Burned bright enough that you might think Hell itself was on holiday.  Glass popping, carpets curling, plastic melting.  Least . . . that’s what I hoped it looked like.

From where I leaned
inside T-Bone’s car, heading away from my third crime scene in as many days, all I could see was black smoke rising up into the sky, March wind dispersing it all over town.

Wind spreading the shit
. . . that’s what Ceinwyn would be doing alright.  Spreading the slap-downs and
you
idiot
looks to anyone in sight.

Had a feeling I’d
be in her sight for a while after this fuck-up.

Something beautiful about that much smoke showing off updrafts and currents.  Start small, get big.  Horde of gray vandals ransacking all over the place
. . . fueled by still overpriced real estate, decade long deflated market or not.

“You didn’t have to do it,”
T-Bone decided.

I tapped my SDR against his window, eyes facing upward. “You talked me out of killing the guy, think you’d be happy.”

“Congratulations, you proved you aren’t a murderer.”

“Harder than you’d think for me
. . .”

“But you’re a pyromaniac.”

“Double special meaning there, given my love life.”

“Burned down a whole mansion
. . . on Van Ness . . . in broad daylight.”

“No one was in it.”

“Thanks for giving me the task of moving a naked guy into the guesthouse, by the way.”

A f
ire-engine went past us going the other way, lights blazing, horn honking.  T-Bone didn’t even pull over.  And he calls me uncivilized.  “I had to get you out of there while I fiddled with the timer on the artifact . . . Hector needed reunited with his pack . . . ‘
two birds and one stone
’
says the geomancer.”

“Because I would have stopped you.”

“Maybe . . . I mean . . . if you ever start throwing bolts of lightning instead of bull-rushing guys as a first instinct, you might actually be dangerous.”

T-Bone
stayed silent for a good sixty seconds before the mancer in him won out.  “What was it?”

“Pyro-anima.”

“Duh.”

“Same as our rings. 
Pyro-anima container for its natural expression.  Put it in a fireplace then have a timer go off . . .
boom
.  Well, not
boom
. . . more
whoosh
.  I assume, since we ran away without being able to see it.”

“Why did you never tell me about it?”

“Very experimental, never tested . . . so I suppose it could have went
boom
, but not on purpose.  You’d be surprised how many of my experiments blow up.  Lot like my assumptions . . .”

More silence.

T-Bone broke it again.  “We firebombed Horatio Vega’s nephew’s house.”

“And beat him and his goons up and cha
ined them in a guesthouse, where they will be found and hopefully arrested,” I added.  “Given how much we screwed up on this whole thing . . . could have ended worse.”

T-Bone
shook his head.  “It’s not over with yet.  Not if I know Vega.”

I chuckled to myself.  “Not if I know Ceinwyn Dale too.”

[CLICK]

Ceinwyn sat on a bench outside of my shop, sipping at a red slushie through a straw.

She sat with her legs crossed, stretched
out to their full length, denim-covered inch by denim-covered inch onto infinity.  The hand not holding the slushie extended as well, fingers tapping against the wood.  She could have been at the park.  Was at the park for all the attention she gave to T-Bone or me.

Her blue eyes were on the clouds and the gray stain of smoke spreading through the sky.  Her blond hair framed a curious expression, held back by a pair of sunglasses.  Her lips
. . . were not smiling.

Oh shit.

Still ignoring the pair of us, Ceinwyn asked, “Did you kill anyone?”

“No,” I sulked.  “
No one
.  Fucking unfair, I tell you.”

Ceinwyn let out of breath of air she’d been holding in.  Her eyes finally dropped, finally met mine.  She caught clue
s I probably didn’t even know were there.  Glass at an elbow, stone dust on a knee.  Surely she saw I favored my shoulder and that my knuckles were scraped up from beating face.

I’d unloaded all the extra artifacts I’d carried back into their cardboard box, sitting in
T-Bone’s backseat.  Only a single SDR now.  KHP.  Didn’t get to test the second on Suit . . . might have killed him, would never know . . . stopped . . .
saved
maybe.

Ceinwyn’s eyes made note of the ring
but moved on.  A brief glance at my partner in crime.  “Are either of you hurt, Tyson?”

“No, Miss Dale.”

Back to me.  Still no smile.  “Explain.”

The March wind ripped around me, pulling at my coat, freezing my neck and face.  If I didn’t know better I’d have thought Ceinwyn entered into some type of Pissed Off God Mode, ready to tornado my ass across town. 
“Did you call Vega yet?”

“Yes.”

I winced.

S
o did T-Bone. “Yeah . . . turd-balls.”

“Double crap
sundae with rainbow sprinkles,” I added.

Ceinwyn talked over the cursing, same as she had when I was fourteen. 
“King Vega was as mystified as I am, but was quick to take umbrage that something might be happening in
his
city with
his
people.  Explain, King Henry,
now
.”

“Can I sit down?”

“No.”

Still no smile.

I’m really in trouble
.  This thought came from King Henry Price.

I’d done plenty of
trouble worthy shit before.  Done plenty of trouble worthy shit since Ceinwyn knew me too.  I’d never seen Ceinwyn this mad.  Even when the whole Isabel-Welf thing blew up at the Asylum.  I’d thought that was the lowest I could go . . . apparently she did have depths of feeling I’d never expected hiding behind her smile.

I’ve done ashamed
as well.  If I do something, no matter how fucked up a normal person would say it is, I’ve got a logical reason for it in my own head.  Sure, emotions . . . I have them, pretty big ones too.  Love me some
pathos
.  But . . . even if my mind was a little
different
. . . equation still had to add up.

I wasn’t ashamed of what I’d done.  Every move made perfect sense at th
e point in time when it was made.  I was just pissed off my information got so screwed up, that assumptions led my logic astray.  Not ashamed at all.  But humbled a bit for once.

Lesson learned.

Probably a lesson I should have learned a few months back with Annie B.  But there had been so many lessons in those few days the one about assumptions had gotten lost.  Big pooling, vampire politics, splitting pools, the Shaky Stick . . . somehow assumptions, like the one I made about the Shaky Stick theft being about the Shaky Stick and San Francisco instead of about Annie B . . . gone like smoke on the wind.

Wasn’t a whole lot else to learn here.  Coyotes are slightly tougher than normal humans
. . . big deal.  Already knew it.  Kicked their asses.  Checkmark.  You up next, fairies?  Want to finally show yourself again, Meteyos?  But . . . assumptions leading me down the wrong path . . . hard not to place that one at the top.

I would have killed
Vega, made my sister a widow, started the war to end all wars . . . on a lie.  There’s a moment you have as a fighter when you really hurt someone for the first time.  Not break a nose or something, I mean
really hurt someone
.

This moment cam
e sixth grade for me.  I knocked a kid out so hard he didn’t wake up for four minutes.  The other kids watching the show called an ambulance while I ran away thinking I might be going to prison for murdering the guy . . . Carter Rogers, that was the name.  I remember now.  High school freshman, bully enough to work me up really good.

He didn’t die.  Didn’t rat me out either.  Probably because he didn’t want to admit a sixth-grader kicked his ass
. . . but still, give the boy props for keeping his tongue.  Didn’t die . . . did  end up with a concussion and stay hospitalized for a few days. 
Did
have brain swelling.

That’s when I realized fighting just
isn’t fun, it’s serious too.  Got to control myself.  From Carter Rogers on I won plenty of fights but I was always careful.  Always remembered my hands
could
kill.

Standing in front of Ceinwyn was the moment I realized I could do th
e same with the Mancy, with my artificing, to levels I’d never even bothered to consider.  As always with me, it took hitting the wall face first to actually do something creative thinking.  “Call Vega back, tell him we need to have peace talks.”

“Assuredly,” Ceinwyn agreed, “after you tell me what happened since our last rushed conversation.”

“T-Bone can tell you,” I said, eyes going to my boarded up shop-front, “I need to make this place presentable.”

I popped the backdoor
of T-Bone’s Leaf, pulled out my two boxes, and walked right on past Ceinwyn.  Just barely, the very corner of a single lip twitched.

That counts.

[CLICK]

“I expected better of you, Tyson.”

“
Did what I could, Miss Dale.”

“I suppose if you hadn’t been here
to be a breakwater then the whole city would be rubble by now?”

“This is
where the road ended when I nagged him the whole time and eventually threatened him with electrocution so . . . probably something worthy of the biblical plagues at least.”

“You threatened King Henry Price?”

“He was going to kill Hector Vega.”

“Nephew?”

“Yes.”

“You’re sure
about King Henry’s intentions?”

“He didn’t want to
. . . but . . . it made sense to him.  I think that’s what I really found scary about the moment.  It wasn’t that King Henry got mad and almost did something stupid . . . I’m used to that . . . it’s that in our situation, or what we thought our situation was, finding out King Vega’s location was worth more to us than Hector’s life, so King Henry was just going to go ahead and do whatever it took to get the information, even if it killed the guy in the process.”

“Doing whatever it takes to reach his goal is what King Henry is best at, no matter the consequences.  It’s what makes him brilliant.”

“And terrifying when you’re trying to stop him from hurting himself.”

“What was your situation?”

“We messed up, Miss Dale . . .”

“Badly?”

“
I
messed up.”

“Indeed?”

“I . . . I got talked into using my security badge to look up info on Vega, his property, files . . . King Henry talked about going and breaking some pipes to flood a warehouse or the sort.” 

“That seemed like a harmless waste of time compared to
the alternative so you agreed to do it.”

“Exactly.  But somehow
. . . the computer must have kicked back results for both
Horatio
Vega and
Hector
Vega and when King Henry saw a mansion on Van Ness he took to it right away as where
Horatio
would be and then . . . that isn’t where he lives at all.”

“Idiots
. . . the pair of you.”

“Sorry.”

“Just for your information, Tyson, the Coyotes have a compound in the mountains the size and extravagance of which you would never imagine possible to be hidden in California.”

“Wouldn’t that show up on Google?”

“Does the Asylum show up?”

“No
. . . but . . .”

“You believe the Learning Council would go to such lengths to hide mancers but not
the Coyote Nation?  Which do you think would actually incite more fear into the populace at large?”

“Oh.”

“You found Hector Vega’s house . . . and then?”

“We jumped the fence, I thought to break a basketball court or
. . . pipes . . .”

“Tyson,
you were very gullible.”

“Stress, lac
k of sleep, not realizing video games can be real . . .”

“Over the fence and I’ll guess King Henry ignored the basketball courts.”