Love and Darkness (The Cause Book 2) (13 page)

Gail winced.

“What is it, dear?” the Lieutenant signed.

“I can’t say, but if you need the story, talk to Tonya.”  Gail knew that the Lieutenant was some sort of friend of Tonya’s, probably a lesser Focus such as Gail.  Political power and capabilities in the Dreaming didn’t correlate, and as far as Gail knew, Tonya had no control over the Dreaming.  A watcher at best, nothing more.

“I’ll watch out for you.  So far, I don’t think our enemies realize your full capabilities,” the Madonna said.  Like Tonya and Gail’s friend Beth Hargrove, the Madonna often overestimated Gail’s abilities and potentials.  “Perhaps with a little work, I can keep your tricks a secret.”

On that enigmatic note, the dream-grouping dispersed from Gail’s garden.

Gilgamesh: September 12, 1972

Gilgamesh’s trip from New Hampshire back to Detroit was long and lonely.  Sumeria felt empty without Sinclair and Hoskins’ company, and the baseball games on the radio only reminded him of his solitude.

Some Guru he was.  His first achievement as a Guru was to get beat out by Sky for the hand of a Focus.  Perhaps he should chuck it and become a Crow Master, as Sinclair wanted.  He understood enough now to identify Count Dowling’s combat form as a large bear.  He must have worked long enough with Hoskins to awaken his inner Shaman.  Unfortunately, becoming a Crow Master meant working with Beast Men
before
they were Noble.  He would rather lick cat fur.  And he did owe the Commander some time with Gail and her crazy household.

He got into Detroit around noon.  Newton waited for him in his apartment.

“Gilgamesh!  You’re back!” Newt said, rising from the couch in the small apartment and sending a partly eaten bag of chips to the floor.

Gilgamesh sighed.  Newton’s things were scattered about, and even his own apartment didn’t seem quite like home any more.

“It’s good to be back.  How’s everything going?”

“Ah, well, there’s something you need to check into,” Newton said.  “I think we’ve got some
biiig
problems.”

“What the hell happened here?” Gilgamesh said.  They sat in the Railway Diner and pretended to eat apple pie, which turned out to be surprisingly tasty.  A couple of blocks away, Gail Rickenbach’s pit of churning dross, her formerly clean household, weighed heavily on his mind and metasense.

“I don’t know!” Newton said, covered in nervous sweat.  Gilgamesh suspected Newt had been worrying for weeks about Focus Rickenbach and her household.

“It’s all right,” Gilgamesh said.  “I’m here now.  We’ll figure this out.”

Newton took a breath and attempted to calm down.

“Just tell me what happened,” Gilgamesh prompted.

“It started with Tiamat’s training visits.  The dross piled up faster than I could use it, but not so fast that it turned into gristle.  Then Lady Death showed up, and all of a sudden…”  Newt waved his hands around, dragging a shirtsleeve through an uneaten scoop of vanilla ice cream.  “Gristle knots.  I talked to Lady Death and she got me cover to get into the Clumsy Angel’s household.  I worked as fast as I could, and I got the gristle knots cleaned out, only...  And then after Lady Death left I thought I could hold everything together, but…”

Gilgamesh nodded. Newton paused, embarrassed.

“Now the Clumsy Angel’s doing insanely complicated things with the juice, and her dross is coming out
slippery
and I can’t handle slippery. Right now, the slippery dross is pretty fresh and isn’t giving her a lot of trouble, but what’s going to happen when the crap starts to harden? It’s going to poison everyone in the entire place!  This isn’t something I can just walk up to the Clumsy Angel or Tiamat and talk to them about!”  Newton only talked to Tiamat in whispers from outside of her metasense range and over the telephone.  Gilgamesh had been working with Newton on that problem for a while, but Newton was right.  Bracing Tiamat on this problem would be stressful, even for Gilgamesh.  “And all the Clumsy Angel ever does anymore is practice!”

“Newton, calm down.  We’re the expert dross cleaners,” Gilgamesh said.  Some Guru salon this would be – Gilgamesh’s emergency Focus rescue service.  Gaah.  He needed to set aside time for some proper letter writing and arm-twisting.  “If we can’t handle this, nobody can.”

“Gilgamesh?” Van said.  Gilgamesh nodded and wiggled his fingers to indicate Van should come over to him.  Gilgamesh stood in the late afternoon shadows along the southeast side of the apartment building.  Van often worked in the afternoons at an impromptu picnic table set up in the sun, all to escape the overwhelming bustle of Gail’s household.  “Gail’s been looking all over for you.”

“I don’t want to bother her at her practice, but I need to get into the apartments on the quiet to do some dross removal work.”

Van blinked and shook his head.  “I thought it was getting a bit itchy inside the apartment.  It’s bad enough that we’ve got gristle dross, and you need to be coming in with one of the skittish Crows?”

“No, something worse.  Slippery dross.”

“Oh, crap,” Van said.  He closed his book, a 12 by 15 large typeface government report, printed on thick paper, written by the CDC about the St. Louis Detention Center.  “You’re talking about the sort of dross that drives Crows away from the nasty Focuses, aren’t you?”  He paused, likely attempting to remember everything Gilgamesh had taught him about dross production by Focuses.  Gilgamesh liked Van more than a little, and Gilgamesh served as Van’s secret source on the Crow viewpoint about Focuses and Arms for Van’s books.  “What’s Gail doing producing slippery dross, anyway?  Not only hasn’t she been torturing people, the new household organizational system is working so well she hasn’t disciplined
anyone
recently.”

Where did Van get this document from, anyway?  Gilgamesh guessed the source to be the Good Doctor, likely using Sylvie as an intermediary.  The Good Doctor had a soft spot for vivacious young women, and Gail’s number two definitely counted.

“I believe it’s a case of correlation, not causation,” Gilgamesh said.  “Though I do find it worrisome.  Her metapresence is darker than before.”

“Tell me about it,” Van said, and sighed.  A chilly breeze rustled the trees and Van shivered.  Gilgamesh’s shadowed corner was a good ten degrees cooler than Van’s sunny picnic table.  “Right now, her darkness is expressing itself as workaholism and the attendant ‘don’t bump my elbow’ crankies, but from my own flaws…”  He let his voice tail off.  “Well, I certainly wouldn’t want to be in the same county with
me
if I possessed Gail’s capabilities and someone bumped my elbow while I was deep in my work.”

“You’re afraid she’ll get used to wielding power for expedience sake.”

Van nodded.  “Let me talk to Sylvie and Kurt.  We’ll set up a midnight scramble for tonight, if you want.”

“That will work.”

At least Tiamat stuck him with a Focus he liked, Gilgamesh reflected as he and Newton balanced an oversized jelly cube of slippery dross between them and exited the apartment complex.  Gail’s juice structure amazed him, more complex than before and almost as beautiful as Lori’s.

Crickets chirped and the cool nighttime breeze tugged at Gilgamesh’s jacket.  Clouds hid the stars and Gilgamesh suspected they were due for rain before morning.  All the household but Gail and a single guard slept, all bedded down on the second floor as part of the midnight scramble operation.  In a few hours, after Gilgamesh and Newt finished cleaning out the first floor, Kurt and Sylvie would shift people around to give the two Crows access to the second floor.

Gail worked in her office, practicing her complex juice patterns.  Although as complex as Focus Daumarie’s, they were vastly different, the complexity in a new direction.  He thought of his former wife, Gina, and her crocheting hobby, as crochet was a good analogy for Focuses and their juice patterns.  Focus Daumerie crocheted juice pattern lace, small and ornate, while Gail crocheted comforter-sized juice patterns made out of repeating tiny and less ornate juice patterns.

Gail practiced as Gilgamesh worked.  He wondered if she was a better witch than he was a wizard.  She could certainly crochet her juice patterns
quickly
.

He wasn’t sure how far he could trust Tiamat about Gail.  After comparing Tiamat’s current metapresence with Gail’s, and extrapolating the attendant changes to their juice structures, he decided Tiamat loved Gail, and vice versa. He suspected neither of them realized.

Tiamat had fallen for an angelic little Focus who wasn’t quite so angelic anymore. Fallen hard, too.  If Gail turned on him, and forced the Arm to decide between them, he doubted she would decide in his favor.

He and Newton dropped the slippery dross in a parking lot two blocks away, moving Crow silent through the scattered leaves.  Once out of the Rickenbach household, the slippery dross would age quickly and become a Crow delicacy in two days, if Gilgamesh remembered the late Crow Wire’s old lessons correctly.

He decided he was being paranoid about Gail. Although Gail could be temperamental, she was an honorable, intelligent and kind Focus. They had been friends for years, Gail being one of the few Focuses who understood his fears about being a pioneer Major Transform.  She would never turn on him or harm him on purpose.

Two of the local housecats found him and rubbed up against his legs as he and Newton swept together the next batch of slippery dross.  The local cats at least appeared to like him.

The Clumsy Angel’s household possessed ample beauty, but not as beautiful as before, or as beautiful as it could be. They needed the household tuning. They could use quite a bit of tuning, actually. He wondered if Gail would work with him and tune her household, and laughed bitterly.  Occum was right.  He didn’t have the months or years necessary to build the required Affinity bond.  This was, in all likelihood, a lost cause.

He and Newton didn’t find any problems until Van and Sylvie moved the now-sleeping Gail out of her office and down the hall to Kurt and Sylvie’s room.  As they exited Gail’s office, Gail said “Oh, Gilgamesh, you’re here” in her sleep, and nestled up to Van in an awkwardly seductive fashion.  Van’s transparent flinch and instant jealousy portended future drama.  Sylvie’s naked bedroom eyes on Gilgamesh, while he watched Van and Gail, meant she had been listening to the Inferno stories about Sky and the Inferno women Transforms, and that, too, meant future drama.  Lastly, once everyone else cleared out of Van and Gail’s apartment, he and Newton hadn’t been able to pick up more than tiny amounts of the slippery dross draped over Gail’s desk.

The Good Doctor’s new juice pattern system produced an entirely new and more difficult to handle form of dross.  And that certainly boded ill for the future.

Now
this
was a problem worthy of a Crow Guru, Gilgamesh decided.  After he and Newton finished and he returned to his apartment, he ignored the potential for drama and started work on decoding this new dross variety.

Carol Hancock: September 13, 1972

“Progress toward pattern codification?” Hank said.  We met in his new office in Littleside, a spacious, airy place, much larger than his old dump and more comfortable than his Littleside lab.  I suppressed the urge to carve divots out of his shiny new desk.  “No, no, you’re looking at this wrong, Carol.  The proof of concept part of the project is finished.  It works.  It’s proven.  What Gail and I are working on now is making this
real
instead of the toy version of witch.  We aren’t facing theoretical issues now, but time issues.”

“Come on, things can’t be that good,” I said.  Too much time on the phone this morning, so I needed a break.  I had been talking with Terry Bishop of Inferno, going over possibilities for the new boots I would be using for my new combat method.  I needed the soles to be a lightweight metal sandwiched between shoe layers, and thus invisible.  She talked me into titanium, which she assured me she would be able to sweet-talk out of Bob’s Barn or their contacts. “Are there any real issues standing between where you are now and releasing this to the Focuses?”

“Personal signifiers,” Hank said.  “I know they exist, and they’re a big hairy mess. I’ll need to borrow some of our best metasensers for a few days to crack the problem.”  Gilgamesh.  Sibrian.  Gail as well.  Perhaps even Sky.  I nodded.

“Okay.  Give.  What’s a personal signifier?”  I tried to keep the glee out of my voice.  This was something I could take to Keaton to show her that Haggerty’s crazy
push the Cause
scheme worked.

“It’s the part of the juice pattern unique to each Focus, but the signifier isn’t stable and changes over time.  If we can’t crack the personal signifier issue, the patterns won’t be transportable.”  I nodded.  A Focus would be able to create a book of pattern formulas she wouldn’t need to memorize, but she wouldn’t be able to pass her patterns to another Focus.  An improvement, but not good enough.

“How soon will you need more Focuses involved?”  Linda Cooley, a powerful Focus I often worked with, would be perfect for this.

“Weeks, and not many,” Hank said.  He allowed himself a small smile.  He understood the potential of his research, and he was starting to get the prideful scientist inventor ‘I am God’ feeling going.  This time, he damned well earned his faux divinity.  “I cadged some time with one of the Crows’ research experts, a Crow I’ve worked with before, named Dark Star.”