The Foul Mouth and the Fanged Lady (26 page)

Then a grad student found me, first day of
the year. First class of the year. I wasn’t even completely awake
yet.
Languages
. Jethro Smith handed out our first book
assignment.
Hamlet
. He always started us out with
Shakespeare. I’d just touched my hands on the book for the first
time, flipping through the yellowed pages of a copy older than I
was, when I heard my name. No biggie. Been called out of class for
things before. Bit surprised though, since it was the first time in
a while I hadn’t actually done
something
.

Jethro Smith gave me the devil-rocker-sign
when I looked his way. Dude wore a leather jacket too. Douchebag
necromancers. My next glance went to Welf—expecting an expression
of glee on his face over some game gone right, but instead I only
saw puzzlement and trepidation, like he wondered if
I
wasn’t
making a game myself. About the last thing I expected was to be
told to go to my dorm room and that someone was waiting for me
there.

I was even more shocked when it was
Ceinwyn.

She sat on our couch, looking the same as
she always looks. Good. Beautiful. Clean. Out of the league of
every man on the planet. There were clothes in her lap, cradled
like a teddy bear. A t-shirt . . . new. Jeans. Shoes. Seeing
Ceinwyn Dale stopped me at the door. Focusing in on the clothes . .
. I thought,
what the fuck? A trip?
Or something like that.
Then I saw she didn’t have a smile on her face . . . and the world
dropped out.

“What happened?”

She still didn’t smile. “I’m sorry, King
Henry.”

“What the fuck happened?!? Just tell me!
Don’t give me fucking ‘
sorry
’ and make it worse!”

She motioned to the couch, calm as always.
“Sit down.”

I didn’t move. “
Fucking tell me
.”

She didn’t. She stood up and put the clothes
aside. T-shirt. Jeans. Shoes. She walked over to me. Then, while I
stared up at her, too frightened to move, she hugged me.
Oh,
shit
.

“One of them dead?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Mom?” Certain I already knew.

“Yes.”

I blinked. “But . . . she finally sent me a
letter . . .”

“She’s dead, King Henry.”

“But . . .”

“She’s had cancer . . . it came on very
quick and nothing could stop it. The doctors gave her six months .
. . but she didn’t even make that.”

And I lost it.

I cried; I grabbed on the Ceinwyn Dale like
she was the only thing holding me up. I cried some more. She didn’t
shush me. She knew me too well. Knew I needed to get it out. She
just held on. And I cried and cried and cried like only a
sixteen-year-old boy feeling a new pain can. Every wall or trap or
protection I’d built up over the years were just . . .
gone
.

“Momma . . .” I whined between gritted
teeth. “Why didn’t she wait for me?”

“It’s not your fault, King Henry,” Ceinwyn
whispered as I shuddered.

“I could’ve helped her . . .”

“You aren’t ready for that yet. You know you
aren’t.”

“But . . . why? Why fucking
now
?” I
finally pushed away from her hold. “Why? Fucking
why
?” I
started pacing the common room—repeating “why?” over and over.

I’d been writing Mom for two years. Telling
her all sorts of things I technically shouldn’t have been. About
the Mancy, about how I could help her one day. About my teachers.
About girls. Stuff she always wanted to know but I’d never bothered
with before, because face to face is too difficult.

I only got two letters back. One was from
Dad saying that Mom got them and she read them but it was hard for
her to write back, every time she tried things slipped away from
her and it was a week straight of ‘Bad Days’. The second letter,
the one I’d just gotten during August break was finally from Mom.
The letter I’d always hoped for: that she’s proud of me, and read
everything I wrote, and couldn’t wait to talk to me about it all
once we saw each other again.

Now she’s dead.

“Fucking bullshit!” I screamed, glaring back
at Ceinwyn Dale, flashing my teeth, snarling like some rabid
animal.

She finally smiled at me. “It is. Death is .
. .
fucking bullshit
.”

Everything went out of me. The bubbling
anger and mistrust of the universe as a whole fell apart upon
itself, crashing away into a deep pit somewhere in the back of my
mind where it could stew for as long as it needed too. It was a
snap, something metal breaking, as cleanly as I could with the
Mancy but inside my head.

“I wanted to fix her . . .” I told
Ceinwyn.

“I know, King Henry. She knew too. It was
just too much to fight against.”

I sat back down on the couch, feet shaking.
“People die like this every year . . . crazy from the Mancy.”

“Yes.”

“That’s why you are . . . what you are.”

“Yes. I save as many of you as I can. As
many as they’ll let me . . .”

A whole bunch of silence built up.

“It shouldn’t be this way,” I finally
said.

“You got smart since we last had one of
these emotional discussions.”

My lips turned up reflexively. “Oh, you
know, grew up a bit.”

“It had to happen eventually.”

“If I laugh, will it stop hurting?”

“No.”

I looked at my shaking feet and cried some
more. “Thought so . . .”

[CLICK]

The clothes were for me. Surprise, King
Henry! Mommy’s dead and you get to go right to the funeral just as
you find out!
Special Dispensation for Family Function
,
signed by the Lady herself. Two days to grieve before I had to get
back to school.

Lucky little bastard.

The jeans and t-shirt felt alien to me. Go
two years without something and then go back to it, hard situation
to adapt to. I might as well have never known it in the first
place. ‘
Like riding a bike
’ they say. Stupid phrase. You get
yourself some forty-year-old people that haven’t been on a bike in
twenty-five years and tell them to start racing. Know the results?
You’ll get a lot of dead fat people.

Odd feeling, wearing those jeans and
t-shirt. The uniform I’d grown accustomed to had the same fabric
all over. Same feel on your arms and your legs, tailored to just my
size. But jeans and t-shirts are opposites. Jeans: coarse, heavy,
and restrictive. T-shirt: light, airy, baggy. Both felt weird in a
different way. Yin . . . Yang. Mozart . . . Metallica. Wind . . .
Earth. Least it’s something to think about other than Mom being
dead.

The car was waiting and Ceinwyn Dale drove
us off without any fanfare or fare-thee-wells from either teachers
or students. They were all locked up where they’re supposed to be
locked up. Only I escaped. Back to Visalia, along a route not so
different from the one Ceinwyn took years earlier.

Car was a different color, different make,
still new though. I was taller, I don’t know, probably
five-foot-six by then. Still short as fuck, but the days of being
mistaken for a twelve-year-old were gone. Could have grown some
real-non-fuzzy-facial hair by then too, if I’d wanted it. I’d
grown, but there I was. Same shit. Going to the unknown. Quiet and
brooding and pissed off at the world.

Miles and miles of driving, a stop for
lunch, and then more miles, but this time only one conversation
took place, not so far from the Asylum.

“Did you know?” I asked her.

“Know what, King Henry?”

“
Did you fucking know
?” She glanced
at me. Felt the anima build up in my body probably. A strong breeze
at her neck. “If you fucking knew, or the Lady or Russell, or any
of you knew that Mom was dying . . .”

Her smiling eyes went back to the road. “I
didn’t know, King Henry.”

And I believed her. “No one knew?”

“Your mother passed a few days ago.
Apparently, your father has been in grief over the cancer and then
this . . . he forgot about you or much of anything but her being
dead.”

Cut that bleeding heart again. Drip . . .
drip . . . drip. “Oh . . .”

“Your grandmother was the one who thought of
you. She found the number of the Institution on the internet and
had a conversation with the Lady. This happened yesterday.”

“Oh . . .”

After a time of silence, Ceinwyn Dale had to
have her curiosity satisfied. “What would you have done?”

“If you’d known?” I asked.

“Yes.”

I found my eyes on the child-lock. “We would
have had ourselves an experiment.”

“Whether you can break an axle?”

“I know I can break an axle.”

She smiled her
interesting
smile.
“Then what?”

“I’d have broken the axle . . . then we’d
have seen if you can actually fly.”

That made her smile more. Which goes to show
you why I love Ceinwyn Dale like the aunt I never had.

[CLICK]

Emotionally, I was completely fucked up by
the time we reached the church where they were having the funeral
service. Emotionally more fucked up than usual.

“Do you want me to come in with you or to
stay here?” Ceinwyn asked me, showing some real concern for once.
Guess I looked that bad.

How’s a sixteen-year-old boy with a dead
mother supposed to look? Can’t say I knew back then. Shit like that
gets blacklisted by we-want-happy-endings-Hollywood and how else am
I supposed to see it? I was still at the age where death seemed
like something that happened to other people in a world of black
and white. You heard reports of death. You didn’t see it. You
especially didn’t
feel
it.

I felt it, so I looked a little different
than usual. A little quieter, little more contained with my
foul-mouthed vocabulary, holding back against an eruption of anima
of Old Testament proportions and ready to ruin people. I’d learned
enough to control anima and the Mancy by then, but still, part of
control is being able to let something loose. Damned if a piece of
me didn’t want to uncork it all and have an accidental anima
discharge to rival all accidental anima discharges. Can a geomancer
break the world in half? No . . . we can’t. But we can scar the
world’s face if we put some effort into it.

My face ashen, I told Ceinwyn Dale, “I got
to do this one alone.”

“No, King Henry,” she corrected me, “You
don’t.”

“Getting all touchy-feely on me, Miss
Dale?”

“I know the signs of someone hurting and,
more importantly: I’ve felt what you’re feeling many more times
than you.”

I couldn’t bear keeping those smiling eyes
in my sight. “You feel bad she’s dead?”

“I feel bad when any mancer dies of madness,
but I’ve also lost my father as a young girl and my mother as a
teenager.” She might have smiled, I didn’t risk a peek. “I know it
sends the world crashing down and a more dangerous one rises in its
place.”

The car door opened before me as a flick of
anima unbolted a latch, bleeding off the energy on what seemed
inconsequential . . . before I got into that church and sent the
building crumbling down, creating a new round of martyrs and saints
out of the petitioners. “Tell you what, I’m going to go bury the
old world right now, when I come back . . . you can tell me all you
want to about the new one. How ‘bout that?”

She didn’t reach out for me. That’s not a
Ceinwyn Dale kind of thing to do, instead a Ceinwyn Dale kind of
thing to do is to accept the choice I made and see what I made with
the next one coming on up. “I’ll be waiting, King Henry, don’t try
to run away.”

I stood up outside the car. T-shirt. Jeans.
Shoes. Ashen face. Not looking very much a mancer but feeling like
one on the inside more than ever. That’s earth for you. Holding it
all in, keeping everyone protected, but then—bang. Mountains crash,
buildings fall, rivers are dammed and civilizations end. “Where
would I run to?” I asked.

“I didn’t say run to,” Ceinwyn Dale correct
me again, “I said run
away
.”

“Right . . . but I got to face this
one.”

“I’ll be waiting,” she repeated.

My feet went forward.

[CLICK]

That’s the first and only time I’ve ever set
foot in a church. Can’t say it’s a good event to be first
experiencing God’s hallowed ground, but Shithole Price was never
big on drinking the Jesus Juice. By the time Sunday rolled around,
Dad was exhausted from working hard the other six days of the week.
So he did like God and rested, usually in front of the couch with
football on our television and too much liquor stored in one of
those cheap styrofoam iceboxes at his feet. The older I got, the
worse Mom got, and the worse the Sunday drinking got.

Friends would talk about church to me, and
Sally even tried to get me to come to hers a few times, but I never
took the jump. That’s too close for my tastes. Too close to
something permanent once you began doing activities together. Given
how she ended up a stripper, her preacher couldn’t have been much
worth listening to anyway.

Darkness held onto the church, cradling
corners and draping from the rafters. I always thought of light on
the rare occasions I thought of God, but suddenly I was in his
house and my eyes were left to adjust to the dimmed haze. Maybe for
funerals they turned the lights down. Seemed practical. Harder to
see the body’s rotting face that way. That thought stuck and
stopped my feet.

I hung near the doors like a coward, trapped
between running away, despite my brave words to Ceinwyn, and going
forward. There were probably an even hundred people in the pews, no
one noticing me. Old friends of Mom, or work buddies of Dad showing
support. All of them were staring forward, heads drooping just a
bit or looking off to the side. Not many eyes meet at a funeral.
People don’t want to see the question in another’s gaze:
what if
it was me?
Instead they find the ground or even close their
eyes.