Free Book 12 - Cruel Zinc Melodies by Glen Cook

wings, ditto. Then it stopped struggling. It seemed to be assessing its situation.
    ‘‘Garrett!’’
    It flipped. It faced me. Big brown jaw things clacked.
    It charged.
    I delivered a masterful spinning kick. After which I deposited the opposite side of my lap on the cobblestones. A snicker came from the coach, where my sweetie was evading the weather.
    The bug smacked into the coach’s big back wheel. The hub did some damage. The bug fell, shuddered, and expired.
    ‘‘Maybe less dangerous than they look.’’
    I’m not big on reasoning this stuff out, but I figure bugs naturally come the size that’s best for them. Which meant the normal vermin crop are exactly the right size.
    So, back to the mad sorcerer notion.

19
    ‘‘Mr. Garrett?’’
    A kid had come up behind me. ‘‘Kip Prose! How are you?’’ I hadn’t seen him for a while. He’d grown, though he was still barely a mouse breath more than five feet. His blond hair was longer and wilder, his eyes bluer and crazier. His waist was more substantial. His freckles were more numerous. He did a better job of holding still, but broke into sudden, brief fits of scratching and twitching. Wealth hadn’t changed him inside.
    Cypres Prose is the strangest kid I ever met. He has three redeeming qualities. Two any man can see at a glance. A gorgeous mother, Kayne Prose. And an older sister, Cassie Doap, who makes Mom look dowdy. The third quality is less obvious: the boy is a screaming genius. Of no special ambition, but with ideas that could make a lot of people rich. Maybe including me.
    I have that small interest in the manufactory producing three-wheels, writing sticks, and other innovations sprung from Kip Prose’s twisted brain. I have the points because I found the genius, kept him alive, and put him together with people who have the money and space to create a manufacturing concern. The Weiders and the Tates.
    ‘‘I’m doing quite well, Mr. Garrett. And yourself?’’
    I was suspicious immediately. Be abidingly suspicious of any teenage male who is mannerly, respectful, and absent attitude.
    That kid is up to something. Guaranteed.
    Kip wasn’t alone. Two friends, of a similarly weird appearance, had stayed across the street. They pretended no interest in what was going on.
    Definitely suspicious.
    Tinnie is a clever judge of people. When she bothers. Usually she deploys her skills against me alone. She made an exception here. ‘‘And how is your mother? And your sister, Cassie?’’ She turned on the flaming redheaded heat, guaranteed to send Kip into cardiac arrest, turn him to gelatin, and make him speak in tongues with vocabularies of one syllable.
    Kip chirped like a frog. Once.
    Tinnie got very close to him.
    Kip knew who she was. One of those black widow fantasy women from the Tate tribe. He’d seen her around the manufactory. No doubt she’d imprinted herself on his libidinous consciousness.
    It’s bad enough when that wicked wench turns it on to an old jade like me. It’s fish in a barrel, targeting a repressed boy Cypres Prose’s age.
    ‘‘Oh, that’s good,’’ I said. ‘‘You fried his brain. How do I get anything out of him now?’’ Kip’s friends, I noted, were not pleased, either.
    ‘‘What do you want to know? Maybe I’ll ask.’’
    ‘‘All right. But afterward I’m going to drive a stake through your heart.’’
    ‘‘That’s a straight line I could play with for . . . a minute or two.’’
    ‘‘Promises, promises.’’
    Kip resumed breathing.
    Tinnie told me, ‘‘You don’t want to know about his mother or sister. When I snap my fingers you will forget he has a mother or sister.’’ Snap!
    ‘‘Yes, master. I have no interest in the welfare of absent beautiful women. But now I know how you cast your spell on me.’’
    That earned me a nasty look. I survived it and worse consequences because Kip’s eyes rolled back down. He began speaking actual words.
    I asked, ‘‘What the hell are you