The Foul Mouth and the Fanged Lady

Book excerpt: My name is King Henry Price.Yes, really. Don't blame Mom, she was already a little Anima Mad by the time I was born. See, world ain't as simple as you mundanes think it is. Whole lot more complicated, whole lot more messy, whole lot more foul.Got your Vampires, not the sparkly pretty boys you're expecting from romance covers, but blood parasites living in a human shell. Just waiting to cut your skin open and suck you dry from the inside out. Got your Weres, not a hunk among them and gangsters and thugs every one, transform into whatever the idiot first made their Totem decided to sacrifice, be it coyote, wolf, tiger or even your momma's Shih Tzu.Last, you got your mancers. That's my group of misfits and malcontents. I first heard of the Mancy when I was fourteen. Smiling blond woman came to recruit me and I was insistent I was going nowhere. But when she walked on through my locked bedroom door like it wasn't there, even a jaded, pugnacious, teenage punk like King Henry Price had to give the sales pitch a second thought.Got trained, seven years at the Institution of Elements, or the Asylum as the student body calls it. I'm a geomancer, special kind of geomancer called an Artificer even. After graduation I made a deal with that same recruiter and opened my own Artificer shop, making magical items of power for all comers, be they Were, Vampire, or Mancer.What I didn't sign up for was a vampire named Annie B coming into my shop and kidnapping me. Never trust the pretty ones, especially the pretty ones want to eat on you.