In this Night We Own (The Commander Book 6) (27 page)

I didn’t get a chance to play Rogue Arm and cause mayhem and mindless destruction, as my instincts demanded of me.  Instead, I started abusing Ila, Frances and Zielinski all day and night as I put together my faux PhD dissertation.  I knew I did exactly as Biggioni wanted.  I didn’t see any other choice.

I was, however, fucking tired of Biggioni
winning
.

Chapter 8

The non-aggressive nature of the Crow goes hand in hand with his absurd abhorrence to having others push him around.

“The Life of Crows”

Viscount Robert Sellers: November 3, 1968

When the Nobles, Master Occum and the Commoners left the camp, leaving him behind, Sellers told himself this was all part of the ruse.  His plan.  He hurt anyway, the cold, lonely feeling of abandonment.

Messing with the juice this way wasn’t safe, he knew.  Master Occum had assured him that as a mature Noble, he had a little time before the loss of his connection to the household cost him his humanity.  The drumming remained in his mind.  He could function despite his lower than normal juice, necessary to convince the dragon Monster of his vulnerability.  He would regenerate the lost blood, now spread liberally around the former camp.

He faked the limp.  There was only so far he was willing to press this charade, and when they sprung the trap on the Monster, he would need every physical advantage he could muster.

They had convinced Master Occum that the Dragon did indeed possess a metasense, though what variety they had no idea.  Sir Dowling believed it was unique to the Monster, or at least unlike any other metasense any other Monsters might have, based on his reading on the subject.  His theory was that this Monster’s metasense range was, yes, around three miles, and tuned to the Monster’s likely competition – creatures possessing élan.  Which all the Nobles possessed, of course.

Sellers remained curled at the foot of a stunted pine when, an hour and a half after the household’s departure, the dragon Monster started her slow approach.  He waited until the Monster was visible before he rose to his feet in apparent surprise, feigning the loss of his own metasense.

To his disgust, the Monster had grown back the mouth tendrils he had bitten off.  When she saw and smelled his condition, she charged, thinking him easy meat.  As any predator would.

Sellers took the brief second of his supposed surprise to take in her physical appearance as she thundered her massive way toward him.  He hadn’t noticed before, but her eyes were vastly non-human, fist sized red lizard eyes filled with gold and green specks, her pupils vertical slits.  Given the shape of her skull and brain case, significantly narrower than a human’s and far longer, there could be nothing remotely human left inside her mind.  Master Occum was right.  Even Suzie, a fully mature Monster when they captured her, had more humanity left in her, had more of a human brain inside.  She had remembered she had once been human.  She had retained the ability to understand several dozen words.  She wasn’t a special case, according to Focus Queen Rizzari; well over half of the older Monsters she had autopsied had brains within spitting distance of the shape and form of their old human brains.  She and Master Occum believed that in time that Crow Masters would be able to bring all such older Monsters back.

Nobody would ever be able to bring this old Monster back, though.

Sellers ran through the trees, limping, making sure the Monster noted the faux wounds on his lower torso and back right leg.  He was the straggler, the one the herd left behind.  The easy target for any predator, the way of all nature.  The faux wounds were his new trick, his own idea based off Suzie’s suggestion.  A Chimera’s ability to change shape wasn’t limited to set human and beast forms.  There were all sorts of possibilities, and if he was careful to keep away from his head, a Chimera could play with all sorts of strange shape changes and keep his mind and humanity.  No, he didn’t really have so bad a gaping wound in his abdomen that his intestines hung out.  It just looked that way.  He had grown some ‘extras’.

He needed the faux wounds to make the other changes he had made to his shape believable.  No way could he run as fast as normal, with his
other
changes.

The Monster made no sound as she slowed her charge to a walk, hindered by the effort of navigating through the trees and the bulk of her huge self.  Sellers took a path away from the household, and stopped running three quarters of a mile from the dragon Monster.  She followed, stalking him, and charged for a second time a half hour later.

Sellers ran again, this time slower, this time letting the dragon Monster charge up to twenty feet from him before she exhausted herself.  He ‘collapsed’ several hundred feet farther, and when the dragon Monster moved toward him, at a walk, he limped away, matching her speed…and turning back toward the path the household took, along the top of one of the narrow gravel hills that Master Occum called eskers.

The dragon Monster stopped a half mile from the foot of the esker.  Sellers cursed, thinking furiously about what to do.  Being prey was unfamiliar to him.  He was always the predator, always the one on the stalk.  What would prey do?  He couldn’t charge back, his instinctive response.

Well, shunned by the herd, wounded, and without a metasense, he might not know about the household’s path until he got too close, and it might spook him.  He might panic and do something stupid, such as moving back and forth, instead of away from the dragon Monster.  He had stalked prey that panicked when they got boxed in.

He feigned panic, first angling left, then back to the right, and back to the left again.  The dragon Monster didn’t move.  Dammit, this was where they had the trap set up, with the scent of the household on the move covering the scent they had dropped when they built the trap.  She had to charge
here
.

Ah.

He feigned more panic, and then fell in faux exhaustion.

Ten minutes later, the dragon Monster began to creep forward.  He let her approach to within forty feet before he startled up, feigning more panic.

Yes!  The dragon Monster charged.  He limped away, faster than a walk but slower than a run.  Not fast enough to evade the Monster as she crashed through the pines, knocking over the smaller ones as she moved.  She continued to charge, her weight shaking the ground, six-legged thunder with dangerous halitosis and a bad attitude.  His stupid instincts wanted him to turn and fight, or run like mad, but he managed to keep up his limping fast walk through the trees, toward the trap, barely ahead of the dragon Monster.

Closer.  Closer.  Now!

He leapt up and over the trap, belying his faux wounds.  The dragon Monster, alerted to the possible danger because of his too-wounded impossible leap, tried to skid to a stop, but she was too late.  She crashed through the thin twigs and pine straw covering the trap, and fell fifteen feet down into the pit they had carefully built in the days since their fight with her.

The Monster screamed in agony, skewered on the sharpened logs they had prepared.  Sellers looked over the sloping edge of the pit, saw, as Master Occum suspected with a pit this shallow, that her wounds weren’t fatal, and if they didn’t hurry she would slither off the sharpened logs, climb out of the pit, and escape.  In the distance, he picked up the Duke and the Count sprinting back this way, at his extreme metasense range.

He ran as fast as possible in this not-fully-beast form over to the carefully prepared weapons cache, grabbed the .707 semi-auto, and ammo bag with his quite human hands, hurried back, sat down on his haunches, took aim using his somewhat human arms and shoulders, and shot out the Monster’s left eye.  The bullet didn’t penetrate the Monster’s braincase, and she roared and struggled, breaking several of the sharpened logs.  She, perhaps recognizing his .707 as a firearm, swiveled her head back and forth to avoid giving him an easy target.  He continued to shoot, reloading with a new magazine when necessary, and backing away from the pit when she clambered out.

She charged him, spewing blood and intestines torn from her body by the sharpened pointed logs, and he dropped the .707 and ran away, four legged, on his two real hind legs and his two human arms.  He didn’t need to be quick now, not with the Monster so wounded, but his ass did catch the edge of one of her acid coughs, burning like the world’s worst case of hemorrhoids.

The pain of her acid attack finally pushed him over the edge, into his beast, into his mental combat space where the world became him and everyone else became an enemy.  He circled her to fight, came up from her backside, and started to worry her intestines and other organs.  Bite.  Pull.  Back off.  Charge.  He became the glorious red blood world of no time and eternity.

He fell to the ground, a weight pressing on his mind he vaguely recognized.  A drum sounded, beat, beat, beat.  “Who are you?” a voice said.  “Remember your name.  Who are you?”

“Robert Sellers,” he said.  The ground smelled of blood and shit.  His body twitched, and he saw his right hand, no longer a hand but his paw.  An immense hunger filled him.  Juice hunger.

“Who are you?” the voice said, demanding.  “Remember your name.”

Repetition.  Always repetition.  “Viscount Robert Sellers.”

The drumming continued.  “Who are you…”

Oh.  He blinked and recognized Master Occum.  Growly snarly stooped and gnarled Master Occum, not a wound on him.  A hundred feet away, Sir Dowling complained that dragon Monster meat was nearly inedible.

“I am
Earl
Robert Sellers.”

Gail Rickenbach: November 6, 1968

“What is it about being a Focus that bothers you so much?” Tonya said.

The phone call had ostensibly been about some strange mix up with Beth’s Focus superior, now all fixed up.  All Gail knew was that for a few weeks, someone had forced Beth to cancel her appointments with Gail.  Now the mix up was over, and Tonya apologized and said the mix-up never should have happened.

Tonya called Gail once a week.  Just to check up.  To help.  Their conversations often wandered into areas regarding Focuses and their households, for which Gail was eternally grateful.  Too many problems and issues didn’t have rote solutions.  Every Focus household was different.

“Focuses have too much power,” Gail said.  “You know, ‘power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely’.”

“Well,” Tonya said, “that might be a good saying, but I think it’s a little simplistic.”

Gail shook her head.  With Tonya, nothing was ever simple.  Tonya and her goings on seemed to inhabit a whole different world, one she saw at most a pinhole into.  She had asked Tonya about it last week, trying to figure out what was going on with Beth.  Tonya had replied with a surprised ‘urk!’, and told Gail that she didn’t want to throw Gail into the deep end too early.  Which Gail thought was fine.  As she and her inner circle had discussed, Focus politics appeared to be deadly.

“Simplistic how?” Gail said.

“Because the aphorism doesn’t always apply.” Gail made a prompting noise, and Tonya continued.

“Look at families, for instance.  Parents have a tremendous amount of power over their children, and some of them abuse their power, but the vast majority of parents love their kids and honestly try to be good parents.”

“But I’m not their parent, and they aren’t my children,” Gail said.

“No, but you wanted a case where your axiom isn’t true.  And there it is.  You might want to think about why it’s different for parents and children.”

“Well, because they’re family,” Gail said. “They love their kids.”

“Hmm,” Tonya said.  “Maybe you might want to let yourself love the people in your household.  Have you thought about that?”

Tonya was right.  Being a Focus was quite a bit like being a parent, something she had noticed months before.  However, treating some normal, thirty years older than Gail, someone married to a household Transform, as a child?  Gail didn’t see how this would ever work.  While Gail tried to come up with an appropriate response, she heard a commotion nearby.  With practiced ease, she metasensed several Transforms in the area who weren’t hers.  Gail concentrated on her metasense and picked up Beth’s pattern – and sensed Beth, as well.

“Hey, Tonya, Beth Hargrove just showed up, and I’ve got to run.”

“Hi, Beth!” Gail said, loud and happy, before she saw the other Focus.  Gail jogged down the corridor to the narthex and greeted Beth’s entourage.  Bob Hilton, the man who would be training Gail’s bodyguards, waved from over by the coat racks, having already corralled several of the trainees.

“How’d you know it was me?” Beth said.  “I thought I’d come by and surprise you today, help get Bob started off in his training.”

Gail shrugged.  “Metasense.”

“Metasense?  You can identify me and my Transforms that easily?” Beth said, with a grin.  “That’s neat.  I’ve never been able to learn that trick, myself.”

Gail blinked.  She didn’t think of such an obvious thing as a
trick
.  Before she could say anything, Beth rolled on.

“I love the church and what you’ve done with it,” Beth said.  She bubbled.  “See, I told you that a little creativity could go a long way.”

“Thanks,” Gail said, then smiled.  Her household had found a decent place to live before the Michigan winter had rolled in.  Just barely.  The place they found was St. Luke’s United Methodist Church in the inner city of Detroit.  The old church had stone walls and stained glass windows, a real pipe organ and antique furniture. Big and comfortable and absolutely perfect.

“How’d you find this place, anyway?” Beth said.