The Foul Mouth and the Fanged Lady (10 page)

The blood gave a final squeeze and I dropped
to the ground.

I’d learned my first lesson of fighting a
vampire. The blood . . . that was Annie B. The body . . . that was
only where she lived.

Don’t forget it.

Ceinwyn Dale and her new car showed up the
next morning, early enough that she waited in the kitchen—hanging
onto an
I Love Mom
mug some teacher forced me to make in
Elementary School—while I took a shower. In case you’re wondering,
Elementary and Elementalism school don’t have a whole lot in
common.

Morning in the summer is about the only time
you felt cool in that house, by 11AM some days the temperature
would already have passed ninety, which means there ain’t a whole
lot of relief. Even the people with AC complained—for us it was
torture. Hot in the summer, cold in the winter, so much pollen in
the air during the spring and autumn a normal person’s nose stops
working. All of it locked in a box with a pair of drunks and unable
to escape. No relief—that was my life. Trading stained strings for
silk ones.

And the minute I got my relief, Ceinwyn Dale
sitting out there like the fairy giant she wasn’t, I was scared to
death. Cutting off a gangrene foot can be considered relief if you
see what I mean. But you still miss the foot.

I think I spent an hour in the shower trying
to convince myself it was just a normal Saturday. Get out of the
shower, put some clothes on, and run off to find Sally or some of
my bet-on-me-buddies. That’s all I had to do . . . right . . .

Mom decided on a ‘Bad Day’ and was comatose
on her bed, eyes blinking along to some psychedelic forced-happy
morning show, but Dad sure yelled at me to hurry up every other
minute. He was some kind of manager at the warehouse and usually
worked a couple extra Saturdays a month, but he’d given up the
hours so he could have the day to see me off.

Eventually, I faced up to reality and got
out of the shower, dried myself to the sounds of Al Roker giving
the weather like the fairy giant he was, and dressed myself in some
of my new clothes—shirt with a heavy metal band on the back.
Probably the first new set of complete clothes I’d had in three
years.

When I walked out, Mom was lying there. Only
shower in the house was in the parents’ room, no way around seeing
her. ‘Bad Day’ alright.

“Bye Mom,” I told her, with a little
half-hearted wave.

Wasn’t expecting a reaction and didn’t get
one. Might have been an extra blink or two. It hurt, fuck it hurt,
but I was used to it, so I refrained from having my last words to
her in probably four years be my usual favorites. Instead, I manned
up with, “I love you, I’ll write.” Both lies I thought.

0The suitcase was already in the car, I
guess. It was just me and my empty room. Hadn’t bothered to clean
it. Guess Dad did eventually. Of course, my sisters’ room still had
their stuff in it too, so who knows if he ever got around to it or
they just walled the door up.

“Bye, you piece-of-shit squeaky bed . . .
you too, clangy fan.” The clothes didn’t even deserve comment,
raggy corpses of those that were getting left behind on the
battlefield, victims of all the tears and cuts we’d taken together
in our fist fights. Pocketing my iPod and grabbing a stack of
comics, I left the room, then my house.

Bye, piece-of-shit house.

Ceinwyn Dale and Dad had moved outside. I
remember my fourteen-year-old thought,
Holy crap, this is
actually going to happen
. Ceinwyn Dale smiled at me, but when
didn’t she?

Dad . . . he was a bit more communicative
than Mom, the bed, or the fan. “You be good, boy.”

Who did he think I was? A queer-ass Jonas
brother? “I’ll try.”

“Miss Dale reminded me that if you’re good
you might get to come home in the summer for a month, maybe even
Christmas. Try not to mess it up.”

One thing about my dad, he always thought I
was capable of being better than I ever actually managed growing
up. Maybe that’s why he got mad and whipped me with the belt. Mancy
knows I disappointed him enough times to earn it. Not coming home
would just be one more time. Not like I wanted to go back anyway,
even if I got a promise it would be a whole month of ‘Good
Days’.

“I’ll try,” I repeated.

“No fights, no stealing. Fresh start.”

I nodded and got in the car before either of
us started crying. I knew I couldn’t take that emotional shit after
being raised on repression. That was my goodbye. I was in Ceinwyn
Dale’s hands just like that. And if you don’t think my parents are
screwed up enough already, might I point out they had the judgment
to sign me over to Ceinwyn-fucking-Dale and her freaky ass
smile.

[CLICK]

Inside of the car, sitting on the nice
leather seat and enjoying full blown AC, I continued the
well-practiced teenage art of pretending the world doesn’t exist,
with a bit of no-one-can-understand-what-I’m-going-through for
fun.

My weapon of choice was my iPod and an
Iron Man
comic. Despite what my present twenty-one-year-old
self would call an odd correlation of profession,
fourteen-year-old-me hated Iron Man. Billionaire whose parents
died. It was like my dream and all the jerk-off did is brood about
things and treat his friends and girlfriends like crap.
Give me
that life
, I thought more than once,
won’t see me whine at
all
.

I don’t know how normal, caring parents go
about getting a child’s attention when they’re plugged into
earbuds. If I guessed, I’d say loud yelling or hand gestures, maybe
a tap on the shoulder. Heck, I could even get slapping the back of
the kid’s head. I went to school with teenagers. They were little
assholes just like fourteen-year-old-me, they could probably use a
slap on the back of the head.

Ceinwyn Dale would never win a contest for
either normal or caring. I’m pretty sure she views other people as
disturbances to be studied as they get in the way of her precious
air flows.

My music blared, head nodding along in a
little trance for over half an hour before it stopped with a sudden
silence—that alert silence where you hear everything and I heard
nothing. Picking up the iPod, I tapped the screen trying to figure
out what was wrong. It worked fine. But no sound.

Ceinwyn Dale smiled like she had a private
bet to see how long it would take me to figure it out. Anyone who
had five minutes won. When I pulled my headphones off I noticed
they weren’t connected to each other or the main cord snapped to my
shirt. She had used a slice of air or air friction or something
else I haven’t thought of—I’m not an aeromancer, I don’t do flows,
I don’t do tools that are here and gone again—to sever the
wiring.

How cruel is that shit?

Still smiling, she watched me cradle the
worthless plastic earbuds in my hands just as much as she watched
the road. Expensive, modern machinery made worthless by a ten
dollar piece breaking . . . and like I had an extra pair.

Stop ignoring me, King Henry
.

I wanted to ask her why she’s so mean.
Wanted to ask her how she did it too. How I did what I did, what it
was all about?

Forget that, it was
war
.

My finger found the window controls.
Child-locked. Insulting. A solid piece deep inside me tumbled and
whatever part of the car that controlled the child-lock,
specifically the metal pieces of it, went
crack
. The window
rolled downward.

The iPod and the cut up headphones went out
the window. Bastards would probably take them from me anyway.
Better to wreck them myself. We were moving too fast down the
highway for me to watch them break apart on the road, but I hope it
was spectacular. Promise I didn’t blow up my toys as a kid, but
that one time . . . sometimes you get pushed too far, you got to
wreck something.

If I ever had any doubt that the Central
Valley is a shithole, the next half hour of my life cured me of the
affliction. Rundown farm equipment, outlet malls, pavement and
asphalt, yellow farms that had more weeds than vines in the summer,
and cows, lots of cows—with the window down and my face turned away
from Ceinwyn Dale I smelled every one of them.

There’s something oddly pleasant about the
smell of that much cow shit being together. Go figure . . .

We eventually made our way to Fresno, which
was low on the cows and heavy on the pavement and asphalt. Ceinwyn
Dale pulled the car off the road and into a parking lot.

“Time for breakfast,” Ceinwyn Dale
announced. I didn’t look at her, but she was probably smiling.

Even that defense deserted me once we were
sitting at the table in the diner. Nowhere else to look but across
that small gap at her face. Smiling lips, smiling eyes. She just
ate up the whole situation. She was going to win, but
how
was she going to win? The question of it excited her. She had all
the answers to my many questions and we both knew it.

The
how
excited her; the
why
pissed me off. Why Ceinwyn Dale? Why the Institution of Elements?
Why me? Why did the
how
excite me too? How did I break that
table or that lock? How did Ceinwyn Dale cut my headphones?
How
did she get through the door?

The waitress brought me a kiddy menu on
account of my height. I’d never been in a sit down restaurant
before. The best I ever managed was sixth grade when my oldest
sister—Susanna Belle Price, Mom again—would take me to a bakery
before school for pastries and doughnuts, by seventh grade Susan
moved away and it was back to cereal because Dad went to work early
and Mom was usually passed out on the bed or on the couch. But I
still knew it was an insult.

Kiddy menu. Cruel shit.

Ceinwyn Dale started playing with the
crayons they’d left for me.

She ordered some raspberry thin pancake
woman-watching-her-weight French crap while I engaged the waitress
enough to order the most expensive omelet they had, with chopped
steak and melted cheese and even sautéed mushrooms piled higher
than I could ever eat. My stomach was the biggest part of
fourteen-year-old-me. Okay, second biggest part after Prince
Henry.

What? Stop sniggering.

This was a Mom-and-Pop kind of diner—they
did still existed back then—so the food was long in coming.
Fourteen-year-old-me watched the other diners instead of talking to
Ceinwyn Dale. Like I said, it was Saturday, which meant quite a few
travelers. People driving to Los Angeles. People driving to San
Francisco. No one drove to Fresno—it’s an in-between place. Some
surfers heading to the beach or like Dad, blue collar truckers who
never got a day off.

The larcenous spirit deep inside me started
eyeing a girl’s i
Something
hanging half out of her pocket.
Couldn’t blame it. Small pocket—fat ass.

“Try stealing anything and I’ll give you a
papercut on every single finger, you won’t be able to touch
anything for days.” Ceinwyn Dale didn’t even glance up. She
concentrated on her crayons and the paper in front of her.

“What would you do if I started screaming
about how you were trying to kidnap me?” I asked to get back at
her.

She wasn’t even drawing. No idea
what
she was doing. Using a butter knife, she shaved little piles of
crayon onto the paper. Voodoo for all I knew.

“I’m used to sulking and fear and
occasionally friendly obedience, defiance is such a nice change of
pace, King Henry.” Blue crayon changed to yellow. “I’d leave you
here.”

“You spent three days in Visalia just to
leave me? Don’t believe it.”

“That’s it.” Yellow to black. “You can walk
back to your charming little childhood home and never attend the
Institution of Elements.” Black back to blue. “Do you think your
mother would even notice you came back?” Blue to gray, like she
hadn’t just ripped my heart out. “And just like her you’d be fine
until your neared thirty, then the lack of control and anima
saturation would start to drive you insane.”

Fat ass girl was totally forgotten. “Mom’s a
. . . like me?”

“I’d guess corpusmancer, body manipulation,
judging from how little she’s fallen into middle age despite the
drinking, not to mention such a beautiful body shape despite how
much time she spends lounging. Not an Ultra or she’d already be in
a mental ward.” Gray to green. “But still talented—one of the
strongest Intras I’ve seen. It’s regretful we missed her. For the
both of you.”

The food came and was I glad for it. It let
me ignore what Ceinwyn Dale said and concentrate on my plate. Maybe
that’s how fat ass girl got a fat ass.

Go insane like Mom . . .

How do you throw that at a fourteen-year-old
boy with all the problems I had? I can
barely
handle it now.
I
still
get urges to put a fist through a wall, back then
she’s lucky I didn’t break fat ass girl’s seat and cause an
earthquake from all the jiggle hitting the floor.

When I couldn’t eat any more of my omelet I
finally broke from all the ignoring and what I thought was a
don’t-give-a-shit attitude. “Is this when you turn out to be an
evil werewolf that wants to eat me or something? ‘Cuz that’s some
mean shit.”

Out of one mind-fuck and into another.
“Werewolves are rather pathetic actually. There’s very few of them
and what do exist are scattered across Wyoming and Montana. Hardly
a threat . . .” She smiled at me as she put a delicate piece of
crepe into her mouth.
I have the answers, be good and ask the
questions instead of getting confrontational
. “Any type of Were
isn’t much of a threat when alone; it’s when their Nation gets
large that they become troublesome for mancers in the area. The
Coyotes are the largest in the United States but luckily for us we
have a treaty of mutually ignoring each other.”