***
“The things I do for you, Lover Boy,” Eva mumbled
to herself as she sat in her stolen car, thumbing the steering wheel with a
chaotic beat that made little lyrical sense.
“Not really for you, to be
fair. For the Asylum, like always, but you’re involved so I’m blaming
you, okay? Always liked blaming you when
something went wrong on one of our adventures and you must admit, usually it was your fault. So this is too . . . I’m bored . . . I’m on a
stakeout . . . must be your fault. All.
King. Henry’s. Fault.
Yes. It. Is.”
Eva took a
sip of her water bottle, gray eyes never leaving the dentist shop she was casing. “I mean, I might have already found Iscariot
and delivered Samson’s message to him if you didn’t decide to get yourself
mixed up with the Curator. Now Jackson’s
dead and every inch of you smells like Isabel Soto and well . . . I’m pretty
disgusted with you. Someone should be,
shouldn’t they?
“Boomworm won’t be. Never could understand how she just let your
crap go on by with a chuckle at it all.
Pissed me off from time to time, didn’t it? And I’d tell you it did and we’d yell and get
it out and then we’d be ready for the next leap to take together. I fought to keep you on the path with me . .
. Boomworm just let you roam around like a herding dog after wolves, and you
kept coming back to her with dirt all over your fur and brambles in your paws .
. .”
It was jealousy really. Not even jealousy that he might have been
with other women and she’d never have known it.
It was jealousy that Eva hadn’t been out their roaming with him, getting
her own bit of dirt and bramble in her fur, the smell of strange and exciting
journeys the only perfume she craved. What did you do without me, Lover Boy? How dare you!
You’re mixed up with all that intrigue and I’m out here chasing a
shadow’s shadow!
To be fair . . . she was pretty sure she’d found
it. Isabel and Conan Sapa’s hideout at
least. The corner that the shadow’s shadow is living in . . . argh, I just
can’t stand this spy metaphor junk.
Lying, deceit, subterfuge. That
was the part of her job that she had the most trouble with. The training, the sneaking, the spying, even
the killing she’d done in the name of the Asylum was all fine, not a single
stain on her conscience, but the lying to the few friends she had . . .
“Killing easy . . . lies hard,” she said to
herself.
Lots of
talking to herself lately too.
She just couldn’t talk to her friends about what
she did or even the world she’d fallen into by accepting Samson’s
training. Most of them didn’t even know
how dangerous vampires really were to mancers or that the upper structure of
Vampire society existed. They didn’t
have a clue how much work the Learning Council did to keep them in check and to
keep the peace alive. Add in wild
mancers going insane week by week, Weres expanding the black market for
supernatural goods, and now the Curator . . . Eva was never without something
to do, something she couldn’t talk about.
Another adventure that couldn’t be shared.
“You know what this is like, don’t you, Lover
Boy?” she asked the invisible presence King Henry seemed to have this week in
Las Vegas. “Only difference is that I
was invited into this world by our teachers and you seemed to fall into it,
probably on your face, just like usual.
Or that nice plump tushy you got.”
Maybe she should stop with the metaphors and talk
to him about it some time. They used to
talk all the time . . . best part of their relationship after the sex
really. They just never admitted to each
other that the talking was up there . . . always pretended it wasn’t what they
were about. Sex, adventure, fun . . . casual
. . . nothing more. Then when it might
have been something more . . . what if that stopped all the rest? Couldn’t risk it . . . we have to break up!
Sure, sure, yeah, good idea!
Eva wasn’t sure about going back to that
particular relationship with him. Or
even any relationship that included
physical activities of any sort . . . even with him clear of Boomworm again,
she wasn’t too interested. “Sleeping
with Isabel Soto and that Anne Boleyn months back, what is wrong with that boy?”
But conversation . . . conversation she wouldn’t
mind.
Compare notes.
“I can tell you the names of the Divines and what
they look like, what do you have?” she whispered the imaginary future that she
knew she could never walk towards. “You
know how to split a pool, but what if I can still rock your world when it comes
to anima, Lover Boy?”
She’d never do it . . . but it was nice to pass
the time thinking about doing it.
Truth was . . . she’d left the majority of her
peers behind. King Henry, Welf, maybe
Boomworm if Miss Dale kept feeding her info, but the rest? In another world. “Isabel too, I guess, just on the wrong side
of it all . . . they’ll just make me hunt her down and put her back in her cage
one day, so why not get it out of the way right now? Especially since once I have her Iscariot
will have to come to me . . . then I can deliver Samson’s message, let Lover
Boy deal with Sapa, and hand Isabel back to the normal goons in ESLED . . . what
a brilliant plan, right?”
Fines Samson talked a lot about finding weak
points. Conan Sapa was the weak point in
all of this. “Even if he killed Jackson
somehow, poor big, bastard . . . competing in an underground Were event, why
don’t they learn that Weres always mean trouble and it never works out? Think King Henry would know after that mess
in Los Angeles, but did he learn?
Never!”
If hunting Iscariot was a chore then hunting
Isabel would be a nightmare. “Locking
the most powerful corpusmancer on the planet up in the Pit just to keep the
Anima Quota down; talk about being stupidly optimistic . . . if only the
Learning Council was nearly as good with plans as I am!”
Iscariot:
chore.
Isabel:
nightmare.
Conan Sapa though . . . hard to hide when you’re a
seven-foot-tall corpusmancer who has had who knows what kind of anima
experimentation done on you. Seriously, men and their stupid
muscles. Like all those muscles would
matter anything once the Mancy was brought into the equation. Even without the Mancy, that much bulk would
be nothing but a hindrance. If Jason
hadn’t been surprised that the fight took the deadly turn it did, Eva would
have put money on him winning over Sapa.
But it had taken that turn . . .
“You expect
me to tell you to always fight like your life depends on it,” Eva tried to
do a Fines Samson impression, “but you
don’t get to fight for your
life. You get to fight for the life of
every mancer on the planet. So doubly
don’t be a moron and ever consider to play fair. You’re
the blade that darts in from the shadows, not some stupid ass crusader with a
shield screaming as you charge in, never forget it!”
Conan Sapa, too many muscles or not, was the key
to finding Isabel and Iscariot.
One: find
Conan Sapa.
Two: track
Conan Sapa.
Three:
Confirm Isabel is present.
Four: Call
in the Calvary in the form of King Henry and Welf.
Five:
Capture Isabel.
Six: Use
her as bait to lure out Iscariot.
“Eva Reti, she’s a planner,” she said about
herself before lapsing into awkward silence.
“Eva Reti, she spends too much time alone in stolen cars.”
Recruiters and ESLED proper got their pick from
the Asylum fleet of modern transportation, but not her. Too
obvious, Samson had whispered with a shake of his head, get you killed. You need to know how to always obtain your
own transportation.
So he brought in one of the best car thieves in
the United States to teach her and Eva had been stealing a car every week for
the last couple years. “Alone . . . with
my phone and Candy Crush as my only friends . . . at least they let me borrow
one of the jets occasionally.”
Alone, but still a planner. When everyone else had rushed through the
Ouroboros Casino trying to track Conan Sapa’s quick departure, Eva had tracked
his arrival, particularly the car he arrived in. “Thus proving Samson’s point that company
cars are a bad idea, especially a black Hummer still registered under a
subsidiary of your mercenary company, despite the fact that everyone knows
you’re working for the Curator.”
Too many muscles, not enough brains.
“The description of every corpusmancer on the
planet except for Isabel Soto . . . whose problem is that she has twenty or so
brains all in one head.”
Eva sipped some more water. Once she found out about the Hummer, and
really, a Hummer? “Big muscles, small where it counts,” she
chuckled. Once she found out about the
Hummer, she put in a call to ESLED’s computer club—where most of the
electromancers, cryomancers, and mentimancers ended up—and they returned a list
of Hummers spotted in Las Vegas during the last week. NSA, be super jelly.
Next came an assumption that Sapa wouldn’t be in
an affluent neighborhood or near the Strip itself, which cut down her list to a
dozen. Finally she put in the footwork
and crossed off five possibilities before finding a black Hummer outside a
dilapidated dentist office in a not-so-happy part of town.
Given the way she kept seeing shadows on the edge
of her vision, the sciomancer sign of nearby anima pooling, she knew she was in
the right place. “Only he’s not alone
and I don’t know who’s inside with him.”
Two other cars, a SUV and a Mini-Cooper.
She ran the plates . . . both stolen, unless George Derek Pleck—a
seventy-two-year-old retired high school principal of Lancaster, California—was
working for the Curator. “Someone knows
how the game is played at least.”
She tried to imagine the Curator driving a
Mini-Cooper.
“Just terrifying.”
There was no way the Curator was inside of that
dentist office. Whole idea was
unthinkable, really. Isabel probably
stole one of them, but what about the third?
“And someone had to drive the Hummer after they dropped off Sapa . . .”
That put her at a minimum of four people inside
the building.
Sapa, Isabel . . . but who else?
“Come on, Sapa, keep being stupid. Come on out so I don’t have to go in there
and get a look at all of you.”
***
Three weeks! Check back next week for a King Henry sneak peek!
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