All That We Are (The Commander Book 7) (28 page)

“I called around to some Crows to find any places with a noticeable number of Crows who vacated around the time that Haggerty graduated,” Hephaestus said.  He had found a nice corner by the front door and tucked himself into it.  “That narrowed it down to several large metropolitan areas.”  I nodded.  There were quite a few reasons why a Crow might vacate a city, not just an Arm moving in.  UFOs, drought, bad losing streak for a local sports team, whatever.  This used to be a better trick, back before my CDC incarceration.  Once upon a time, all of a city’s Crows would vanish when an Arm moved in.

Hank knelt in the middle of the room among the papers, trying to sort them into organized piles.  “Needless to say, asking the Crows directly about Haggerty’s location got us nowhere,” he said.  That earned him a dirty look from Hephaestus.  “Three guesses as to why, and the first two don’t count.”  Another dirty look.

Right.  Standard Crow dictum: don’t get involved.

“And then…”  They’re not Arms, I told myself as I pushed down impatience with the slow unfolding of information.  Firmly.  They had no idea how close they are to a full-blown challenge fight.

“And then I had this bright idea about the effect an Arm has in a metro area,” Tom said.  I furrowed eyebrows.  “Consider, ma’am, how many Monster conversions and male withdrawal cases do you allow in Houston?”

I saw his point and barked out a laugh.  “So we can track Arms by the fact the transformation death rate goes
down
where we live?”  Blessed irony.  “The fucking Feebs ought to be thanking me, not hunting me.”  I looked at Tom, who was still pleased. “I take it you leaned on Barnstead for the information on Monster conversions?”

He nodded.  None of them appreciated Barnstead’s true worth to me.  He worked as a reporter for the Chronicle, and knew the best sleazy local dives for ferreting out hot urban gossip.  He was almost passable as a reporter, as well.

“It was a simple matter of data correlation,” Hank said.  “In order of rank, there’s the New York City metro area, Cincinnati and Denver.”

“How much better is New York?” I said.  There was a timing coincidence here I didn’t like or understand.  Shadow, our Rogue Crow, vanished from New York not long after Haggerty ditched Keaton’s tag, leaving behind a fight scene.  Had Haggerty been the one who attacked Shadow?

“Quite a bit better.”

“Only we can’t use this to pin it down past ‘metro area’, from central Jersey to Connecticut,” Tom said.  “You’ll need an army if you want to find her quickly.”

And my army of mercs was suddenly off limits.  Hell.  “Luckily, I know where there’s an army I can hire.  You three stay here and prep up some preliminaries for an emergency move.  I’ll be back when I’m
finished
.”

---

“What, did you expect I’d kidnap you and torture you to get your cooperation?” I said to Lori and her people.  I hadn’t called ahead, coming in disguised as a more than normally pushy Jehovah’s Witness.  I got into the Inferno kitchen before I revealed myself.  They called Lori and she beat feet back from Boston College to talk to me.  Somehow, I had messed up their assumptions on how Arms worked.

There was a lot of assumption bashing going around.  When Lori showed up she smelled of Gilgamesh sex, and if I wasn’t confused, smelled pregnant again.  I did ‘stone face Arm’ and didn’t push.  It took work. Gilgamesh’s antics irked me a lot.  I had the feeling I no longer knew him.

“So,” Lori said.  “What’s the emergency?  Haggerty?” We sat in the library now, around a rectangular wooden table, after Connie had chased out a half-dozen kids doing homework and a couple of nosy adults.

“I need a dozen shooters to serve as analysts, thug deterrents and potentially as thug killers.  Two squads of six.”  I explained what Haggerty had done to me, and the reasons for my paranoia.  “I wouldn’t mind if you tagged along, either, Lori.”

Lori shook her head, as expected.  She hated these little adventures, and a minor Arm fracas, such as this, didn’t meet her criteria for ‘real emergency’.

“What are you offering?” Connie said, her businesswoman face on.

I sighed.  Hank had called that one right.  I thought they would be willing to do it gratis to help the Cause, but Hank was of the opinion that even Inferno couldn’t afford such things.  Someday soon I would have to find a way to slip Inferno a half mil in some devious untraceable fashion.  “I’m offering my mercenary business in Dallas.  I can’t use them anymore, but from a Focus perspective they should be fine.”

Connie frowned.  “We’re not set up to use them either.”  Ann juice signaled to Connie that they could trade them to Tonya, which finally engaged Connie’s full attention.  “I’d like to see the details, ma’am,” Connie said.

I handed over to Connie the specs on my mercs, and the level of FBI trouble they were in, which cut their value immensely.  They would have to be relocated, provided with new identities and suitable day jobs.  She looked at them, shrugged, and handed them to Ann.  The two juice-signaled back and forth for a few moments.  “We’ll take it,” Connie said, “on the condition that Lori chooses the team.”

“No problem,” I said.  Lori’s face lit up as if it was Christmas.  Interesting.  Both Connie and Ann expected me to argue the subject, but Lori hadn’t.  She had won some sort of bet.

I hoped Lori knew what she was doing.  If Lori chose idiots, they would likely be dead idiots if we had trouble, so I trusted Lori to choose the best.  “I’d like to request my tagged people, though, if you don’t have any objections.”  Ann Chiron and Tim Egins.

Lori nodded.  She would have picked them, anyway, because of their tags.  “How soon?” Connie said.

“Tonight, if possible,” I said.  “The more time we give Haggerty, the more time she has to prepare.”  Speed.  Speed.  Speed.

If all those damned military history, science and eyewitness stories were correct, there was no better force multiplier than speed.  Speed and I had become the best of friends.

---

“Ma’am, I think we’ve got her,” Ann said.  We had commandeered the section of the Mid-Manhattan branch of the New York Public Library, at least the area where they kept current newspapers, and went digging for exact locations of recent Monster conversions.  Sky, who Lori had chosen to be Inferno’s on-site Major Transform, kept the rabble away with his tricks, and kept a close watch on me, not the least bit chatty.  I think he was hitting his yearly limit on cranky Arm encounters.

We plotted out the Monster conversions on a map of New York amid the musty smell of old newspapers and microfiche, the assumption being no Arm would let any conversions occur within metasense range of her home.  “The red circles are the Monster conversions, the blue stars are Focus households, and the green squares are gyms,” Ann said.  The gyms were my idea.  I hadn’t thought of Focus households, but the message was clear.  Only one area had a dearth of Monster conversions, nearby gyms and no Focus households; yes, we had ourselves an Arm on the upper west side of Manhattan.  Relatively close to my library HQ, across the long diagonal of Central Park.

“Let’s go,” I said, and worked out arrangements in my head.  I wanted everyone in our entire troop within my metasense range.  Sky wasn’t being any use in the analysis, doing the full Crow paranoia metasense scan routine.  Something about the situation triggered his distrust of coincidences, with which I concurred.

I just loved having Major Transform allies.

“What’s the plan?” Tim said.

“I’m going to use the same method she used to find me: gyms, then normals who’ve dealt with her, then directly, by scent.  The rest of you are making sure there are no surprises.  No armies of police trying to ambush me.  No Monsters lying in wait in the trash dumpsters.”

“Will do, ma’am.”  I left the details to Tim, and focused on my nose and my metasense.

New York in March was cold and damp, with gray slush in the streets and no sign of any incipient spring.  Haggerty’s main gym was in Morningside Heights, a long stone’s throw from Central Park.  I got obscure reactions from normals just north of there.  For instance, after I described Haggerty to one normal woman, she said “She’s your sister, isn’t she?  That’s funny.  She doesn’t look at all like you.”  Very strange.  Something in our Arm makeup or basic predator effect had messed with that poor woman’s logic.

After two hours of detective work I found Haggerty’s scent saturating an old brownstone about a mile north of the logic-lacking woman.  No juice traces; even a young Arm didn’t lay down a juice trace.  I stopped and shook my head long enough to pull myself out of my stalk and talk to my people.  Gave orders.  I had Tim and Tina’s squad thoroughly case the block around Haggerty’s place and all the adjoining apartments.  All they found were two anomalous normals guarding the stairway to the top floor.  I took a sniff.  They both smelled of Haggerty, but they weren’t tagged.  I had the Inferno squads take them down without killing them and then sent everyone away to do perimeter work and stay out of Arm metasense range of Haggerty’s place.  I had them stay within Sky’s metasense range, though, and we refreshed our Rogue Focus style hand signal language for the situation.  Then, and only then, I went in.

Haggerty proved to be less than ready for me.  The fact she didn’t have any extraordinary protections meant she hadn’t given much thought to my striking back.  Fool of a young Arm.  She would learn.

Looked like I would be the one to teach her.  With everything set that could possibly be set, I let my suppressed rage and predatory anger out.  It felt good.  Oh, it felt good.

The normal who answered the door to Haggerty’s place was young and male. I supposed I shouldn’t have been surprised. He wore a smock and several scattered paint smears.

“Hello?” he said. I brushed past him and entered the apartment.

The man attempted to protest. I turned to him and gave him a cold, dangerous look. The man turned white as a bleached shirt as he figured out what I must be.

My first thought was to kill him to even the balance, but I ignored my rage and instincts and decided against it.  I had a much sweeter revenge planned.

The central area of the apartment was large and airy. The ceiling vaulted high above. It wasn’t quite a studio, because of the bedroom off to the side, which doubled as an office, but the place had only the two rooms.  Given Haggerty’s proclivities, a place without a kitchen had to be a plus.  Paintings hung from the walls and more leaned up against them. There were paintings on easels, and one unfinished painting over by the window.

Detailed maps of the New York metro area hung on every wall, with every Focus and Crow home marked with a pin and a hand-written tag, even Shadow’s old place northeast of Central Park.  I growled at her absurd completeness, and upped the odds that she had attacked Shadow and triggered his current psychotic break.

“The art’s yours?” I asked the man, after I returned to the central area.

“Yes,” he said.

“You are?”

“Mark Castlemont.  Look, I think you want to talk to…”

I didn’t let this no-name artist finish.  Instead, I backed him into a corner and grilled him until he spilled everything he knew.  When I was done with the now nearly dead-from-panic artist, I tied him up, gagged him, and stuffed him in the coat closet.

Two hours later, Haggerty came home, a man in tow. I could tell she knew I was here by the speed she came up the stairs. I braced myself and settled into a fighting crouch.  I wanted to taste her blood.

Haggerty came through the door at a tear, throwing knives at me and leaping. I dodged out of the way of the first knife, caught the second and sent it flying back at her, to land mid-way up her thigh. Then she was on me with a berserker fury terrible to behold.

It did her no good. She was technically a better fighter, but I was the one who knew how to fight.  I had two years more experience and I was a hell of a lot faster. I
was
a predator.  She pretended.  I had an organization and stature.  She didn’t.  I had been through hell as a free Arm.  She hadn’t.  Keaton held my tag.  She didn’t have anyone behind her.  I called her a fool, an idiot, and a pathetic Arm.  She couldn’t even give me one word comebacks.

The fight wasn’t a contest, but that didn’t keep her from trying. She burned juice. She out-fought me on style points. She out-thought me on combat tactics.  It didn’t matter. She lost.  She lost
badly
.

The man she had dragged back, another normal, made it to the front doorway, but one look from me sent him sprawling in tears.  He wasn’t a fighting type.  Haggerty had him tagged, which made him a prize.

It didn’t take long before I had Amy down on the floor, bleeding from a dozen wounds, and my knife pressed into her neck.

“Crawl,” I whispered into her ear.

We both knew this routine, beaten into the both of us by Keaton.  Submit or die.  Haggerty submitted, though it took a half hour worth of pain before she satisfied me her submission was real.  By the time we were done, accent splatters of blood decorated her living room and juice traces filled the rest.  All hers.  I hadn’t had to burn juice to defeat her.

Eventually, I let her speak.  “Ma’am, what do you want of me?” she said, her voice raw.