All That We Are (The Commander Book 7) (4 page)

“Which would be something new, as his captive Focuses among the Hunters do have the Law on them,” Gilgamesh said.

“There’s another possibility,” Lori said.  “The first Focuses.  Look carefully at my metapresence; I have almost identical scarring, although mine’s muted because of some work Sky and I have been doing to remove it.  This is Focus Schrum’s work.”

“You knew about this?” Hank said.  He had deduced this over a year ago, and practically fled Inferno in terror, Crow fashion, when he figured it out.  Later, he passed the information along to Sky, who had seen the scarring long before but hadn’t understood its significance.

Lori nodded.  “Sky told me.”  She paused in thought.  “The location of these salt mine Focuses near Detroit probably isn’t a coincidence, either.  I’ll lay odds that Focus Adkins is their Teacher.  If Tonya’s story is correct, Adkins has her household bad juice tagged.  I’ve played with this, but couldn’t see any way for me to do such a thing; then again, though, I’m not a symbolic juice manipulator.  Perhaps Focus Adkins is.  She’s thought to be unable to use juice patterns, which would follow.”

“Speculation, all speculation,” Keaton said.  Which Hank translated as: worthless.  “But it is an alternative to the Rogue Crow idea, and one we’ll need to look into.”  She turned to Haggerty.  “Congratulations,
Arm Haggerty
.”

“Thank you, ma’am.”  Haggerty said, basking in the glow of her official graduation.

“Congratulations,” Carol said.  “I’d like to…”  Her voice tailed off, as Haggerty had already left the room, Midgard in tow, ignoring Carol’s comment and presence.  Carol practically dropped into a stalk in anger.

This Arm was going to be trouble, Hank decided.  Big trouble.

Carol Hancock: December 24, 1968

“Carol, we have several problems,” Keaton said.

I had snuck out of the oppressive basement, where Hank and Lori were banging on each other about some obscure scientific detail I would demand a report on later.  Last I heard, the two of them had migrated to Lori’s basement lab, where Hank thought he would be able to dredge up evidence to support Haggerty’s crazy theory among Lori’s various Monster, Transform and Focus corpses and tissue samples.

Keaton had followed me to my hidey-hole of the moment, the kitchen.  I had expected to be invisible here, helping the Inferno cooks.  My boss, though, had other ideas.  She was serious, and radiated stress from the close confines of Inferno.  She even used my first name.

“How bad, ma’am?” I said, giving up on the leeks I was sautéing.  I passed the dish off to one of the regular Inferno cooks and looked for a promising corner to talk.  We had already talked about my problem, the Crow agent in my organization, if I believed Guru Snow.  She had ordered me to expose the bozo, but only as a medium priority.  My top priority now was disguising what I was doing.

Keaton winced at the ‘ma’am’, grabbed my elbow and led me outside.  She wanted a real Arm-to-Arm talk.  At least the rain had stopped.  A half-moon shone down through a break in the omnipresent clouds, and illuminated the cold and wet.

“So this place is getting to you?”  If she wanted informal, I could do informal.

“Dammit, Carol, one of them actually gave me a hug.  A Transform giving me a hug!”

And Keaton hadn’t bit her head off.  “Tina?”  Keaton signaled ‘yes’.  “Tag her.”

My comment stopped Keaton short.  “But she’s your Focus’s Transform, Commander.”  I could have done without her ‘Commander’ snipe, but the two of us were definitely in ‘zing’ mode right now.  “I don’t want to poach.”

Meaning she wouldn’t accept me tagging a Transform of one of her Focuses.  “Tagging isn’t poaching,” I said.  Arms were territorial hunters, and we sometimes got a little aggressive about what we considered ‘mine’.  Arms didn’t share.  Normally.  Except for normals and perhaps Transforms: instinctively correct, and definitely unpredictable.  “Consider Hank.”

Keaton frowned and brushed away a drip from the oak above before it fell on her head.  “So you don’t think he’s a special case?  Hmm.  That might be a solution to one of our real problems.”  Pause.  “So, how do you feel about me tagging Tom?”

Zing!  “He’s mine!” I said, barely before thinking about what I said.  My instincts, though, said ‘yes’.  I wasn’t about to, not without a good reason.  “Why?  What’s the problem?”

“Every time he looks at me he’s measuring me for a coffin,” Keaton said.  “I was going to order you to keep him out of my sight, but a tag would work as well.”

Crap.  Keaton was right.  Tom hadn’t ever gotten over my last torture session with my boss.  Hank had.  To Hank, torture was just something Arms did to each other.  Tom, though, needed more experience with Arm-Arm interactions.

“I’ll agree, because he’s my top military guy and you’ll need to deal with him,” I said.  “He’s still mine.”

Keaton rolled her eyes, exquisitely theatric.

“So that’s how Arms build households!” Ann said, a Crow whisper.  From above.  She had been observing us out of a second story window, in the small room Bill Fentress and Steve Huddleston shared.

“They are truly and completely incorrigible,” Keaton said, quiet.  She turned and got predatory.  “This is private.  Go study the Crows or something, Chiron.”

Ann slammed the window sash down with a thunk.  She was one of mine, so I was responsible for defending her, but Keaton was my boss, and I hadn’t ordered Ann to spy on us.  I couldn’t defend her from my boss’s order.

“She’s right, though,” I said, about Ann’s household comment.  Zing!

Who could have predicted that Arm ‘households’ would involve shared Transforms and normals, the exact opposite of what Focuses did?  I had the urge to do a little happy dance at the idea the Focuses didn’t get all the neat tricks.

Keaton glared at the now closed window and searched the area.  No more eavesdroppers.  “Haggerty dropped my tag,” she said, not looking at me.  “The bitch stopped right at the edge of my range and made a show of it.”

“Idiot,” I said.  “So, are you going to hunt her down, or am I?”

“Neither,” Keaton said.  “Not yet.  Keep an ear out, though, for the inevitable screw up.  She’s not going to listen to reason until she’s half dead from her own screw ups or imprisoned.”  Keaton didn’t even have to add the ‘like you were’.  Zing!  “Let’s go.  I need to tag Tina and Tom.”

I found a corner of the giant Inferno living room to hide in, shadowed in the evening darkness.  Conflicted.  I hadn’t liked Keaton tagging Tom, although she had played the scene straight and told Tom the truth about either letting her tag him or keeping out of her sight forever.  I wanted to protect Tom, of course, and yes having my boss tag him did make him safer, but I still didn’t like it.  I didn’t like my boss calling me ‘the Commander’, either, even if she did so as an insult.  It was like an insidious disease spreading through my life.  Bah and humbug.  Merry Christmas.

“You want to talk?” Tim said, and sat down beside me.  Tim Egins was another of the Inferno household members I had tagged.  Like Ann, he was one of Lori’s brain trust, along with Connie Yerizarian (the Inferno household boss) and Sadie Tucker (the Inferno poet and house conscience).  I shook my head, but he didn’t leave, willing to be close and companionable.

I found the presence of a tagged Transform near me comforting.  My mind wandered down strange alleys, where I imagined half a dozen Focus households under my protection and working with me, with dozens if not hundreds of tagged Transforms available for all occasions.  It was numbers; Arms were rare, Focuses were not, and Transforms ubiquitous.  The Arm ‘household’ would be a household of Focus households and their people, some of said people she would share with other allied Arms, serving as both a form of currency and as mediators.  A pleasant dream.  The idea wouldn’t work, now.  I could hold myself together around Transforms without any problems when I was healthy, but eventually, as I was an Arm, I would end up in some damned fight, get crazy wounded, and juice suck some poor Focus’s tagged Transform.  As Lori would say, someday the Focuses would have to learn to be able to give juice to an Arm, but that day was nowhere near.  Until then, no real Arm ‘households’.

I sat and watched as Inferno did its wondrous dance around me.  Gilgamesh had cornered Ann on the other side of the giant room after catching her studying him, Sinclair and Sky.  Instead of chasing her away, he wanted to make her pay for the privilege.

“How did someone of your training end up in a mess like this?” Gilgamesh said.  He radiated a mixture of Crow fierceness and Crow cuddliness, a trick I had seen him use on my people when he wanted answers from them.  These days, he was as dangerous as I was, in his own way.  If not more so.  He, for one, was good enough at masking his own metapresence to spy on Rogue Crow and his people, something none of the rest of us could do.

“My anthropology career was cut short when I became a Transform,” Ann said. “The Focus they assigned me didn’t know what to make of me. She thought the only possible skills for women included prostitution, sales, cutting hair, and taking notes in shorthand.  Not” Ann wiggled her eyebrows “anthropology.  I spent eighteen months doing back-breaking gardening before I managed to learn about Lori and get myself moved here.”

Gilgamesh shrugged.  “So these days you’re studying Major Transform group dynamics?” he said, and she nodded.  He glanced over at Sky and Sinclair, who were both studying
him
.  “Sky and I have never had an easy relationship, even from before either of us met the Focus.  On the other hand, I often feel as if I owe my life to Sinclair.  He’s the one who told me I was a Crow, and he’s helped put me back together after several of my, um, adventures.”

Hmm.  That was considerably more information than I expected Gilgamesh to cough up.  And more personal, too.  Ann Chiron the Anthropologist had achieved nightmare status to many Crows, and I guessed Gilgamesh had decided to deal with his fear Crow fashion, by confronting it.  Good for him.

Ann nodded.  “I can see the difference in the way you interact, but it’s subtle, and there’s still tension.  You Crows and the Arms seem to be about at the same level of fractiousness, if you don’t mind me saying so,” she said.  “With the exception of young Sir Dowling, the three Nobles I’ve met have a much more instinctive grasp of interpersonal dynamics.  The same way the Focuses do.”  She gave him one of her disarming grins, but I felt Gilgamesh’s disquiet at being a research subject.

Join the crowd.

“You consider instinctive backstabbing, backbiting, conspiring, plotting and general bitchiness as less fractious than what the Arms do?” Sky said.  I had wondered how long he would be able to hold back.

“All the Major Transforms’ interactions are primitive,” Ann said.  “For instance, Occum’s household is the Major Transform equivalent of an out-of-control college frat house.”

That almost sounded like fun.  I didn’t say anything, though, content to sit back and watch.

“I wouldn’t say avoiding conflict is ‘primitive’,” Sinclair said.  “I’d always thought it was rather enlightened.”

“Running away from problems isn’t always a solution,” Gilgamesh said.  Ann backed away to let the Crows argue.

“Avoiding conflict isn’t the same as running away,” Sinclair said.  “There’s backing away into the shadows, being polite and nice, and disappearing into thin air, just to name three.”

“Disappearing into thin air?” Ann said, curious.  “Crows can actually turn invisible?”

“The trick is called ‘the vanishing’,” Sky said.  “Or that’s at least what I call it.  It’s an advanced Crow trick.  I can’t do it, though.”

“I’ve seen the trick on multiple occasions,” Gilgamesh said.  “Our Guru, Shadow, can do it.  So can Rogue Crow.”

“I’ve seen it too,” I said.  “It’s disquieting.”

“That’s a nasty trick,” Ann said.  “No wonder you Crows don’t trust each other.”

Gilgamesh nodded.  “Rogue Crow’s been working on getting the Crows to distrust each other for over two years,” he said.

“His plan is working, too,” Sinclair said.  “This is why it’s actually less stressful to have a Crow moot inside a Focus household, rather than outside.”

Crow moot?  Crazy Crows.  Each of them had his own internal language.

Lori came in from the hall, without Hank.  She looked lost in her own mind, but she headed over to me and did her cute charisma thing to get me to scoot over so she could cuddle up next to me.  I didn’t mind.  Upstairs, I metasensed my boss and Tina starting to get it on.  Their reaction to the tagging was quite intense.  I wondered if this was what was bothering Lori, or whether it was something else.

I lost myself in the cuddle for a moment.  Not juice cycling, thank you very much.  I had things to think about and pay attention to.  Tim left us and joined the crew around Ann and the Crows.

“Super-skunk?” Ann said, referring to a secret Sinclair dropped that I had missed.

“Crows, after a year or two, have a one shot attack capable of taking down a Beast Man, dearest one,” Sky said.  Right.  Sky and Ann were lovers, or had been in the recent past.  Pick Sky to be making love with the woman who terrified the other Crows.  Palpable tension existed between them now, though.  “The trick should work, emphasizing the ‘should’, as I have no idea how a super-skunking will work on a Hunter with years of training under Rogue Crow.  It’s only for direst emergencies, because afterwards, we’re essentially depleted.”