Love and Darkness (The Cause Book 2) (46 page)

Especially lust, and she had been sharing her lust with Van, but sex with Van wasn’t like sex with Gilgamesh.  In the back of her mind, she feared she had permanently ruined her relationship with Van.  Why couldn’t sex with Van be this good?

“Do you hate me very much?” she said, in her small voice.

Gilgamesh gently stroked his hand along her cheek.  His touch was gentle and graceful, beside which a normal’s touch seemed impossibly clumsy.

“Why would I hate you?”

“I’ve been such a bitch, not knowing how to behave toward Crows, when I’ve known you forever.”  Of all the Crows she had known he had always been the most interesting, and if she hadn’t been married and Gilgamesh hadn’t been attached to Lori she would have made the moves on him long before.

“I’m almost sorry I missed Lori’s talk with you about Crows.  It’s difficult to see oneself from the outside.”

“Yes, it is.”  Lori had told Gail about how she had switched sides.  Gail could empathize with a Focus throwing in with the Arms…until Lori put on Lady Death and started talking about culling evil from society and trying to convince Gail to read those revolting Ayn Rand books.  Then Lori quoted ‘It is only as retaliation that force may be used and only against the man who starts its use.  No, I do not share his evil or sink to his concept of morality: I merely grant him his choice, destruction, the only destruction he had the right to choose: his own’ from Ayn Rand and Lori’s ideas started to appeal to something deep inside of her.  Gail found this troubling.

Gilgamesh shrugged.  “We’ll figure things out.”

Gail wrapped her arms around her torso.  Crows, like Arms, were too different to understand.  Hell, Focuses were likely as difficult to understand, but after all these years as a Focus her changes and talents seemed natural to her.  But Crows?  Betha had found Gilgamesh three mornings ago in the laundry room, sleeping on a pile of warm laundry fresh out of the dryers.  He said he couldn’t resist warm laundry.  Oh, and no matter where Gilgamesh went, so did several of her household’s pet cats.  Throw in Lori’s comment about Crows being instinctively hard wired for something other than two-valued logic, and her supposed understanding of Crows vanished into the mist.

“So is Van going to be a problem?” she said.  She slept with Gilgamesh because Lori and Dr. Zielinski convinced her she needed to, and because Van grudgingly approved, but even for the fate of the world she didn’t think she could give up Van.

Gilgamesh shook his head.

“This isn’t the way we should have done this, you know,” he said.

“What are you thinking?”

Gilgamesh laid his head down on the pillow beside her and watched her with those warm, quiet eyes.  He was a little like Van, she decided, the same thoughtful silence living behind his eyes.

“We went from distant friendship to close intimates far too quickly.  We broke our established boundaries in just a few weeks,” Gilgamesh said.  “We may spend the rest of our lives together, and we decided to commit to each other on the basis of one single conversation where you agreed out of a sense of responsibility and I was on the rebound.  We’re like a man and a woman in an arranged marriage.”

The analogy seemed depressingly accurate.  “People can make arranged marriages work, though.”

Gilgamesh nodded.  “We need to.  You’re beautiful.  Did you know that?”

“You think so?”

He nodded.  “I’ve always thought so.  Your juice structure is a work of art.  You’re doing things as a Focus, with your household, I’ve never seen before.  Wonderful things.  And your hair is magnificent.”  He slid his hand under the cascade of hair and lifted an arm’s length of it.  Rich rippling brown, with highlights of red and gold.  Since her transformation, her hair was her best feature.

Gilgamesh smiled briefly, a small flickering thing that vanished almost immediately.  “Tiamat must think so, too.  Five months of training and she hasn’t yet made you cut your hair.”

“Why do you call her Tiamat?”  She had always wondered.

That brief smile appeared again.  “We were both just weeks past our transformation when I found her and I didn’t know who or what she was.  I found her engrossing and mesmerizing, and terrifying, so I called her Tiamat.”

“The Babylonian goddess of chaos and death.  It fits.”

He didn’t answer, but merely ran his fingers through her hair, arranging it like a cloak around her shoulders.  Gail rested, comfortably content.

“So do you think we’ve discovered something important?  Are Focuses and Crows
supposed
to live together?”  She grinned.  “Are a bunch of Crows and Focuses going to be following in our footsteps?”

Gilgamesh found the end of a lock of hair, and teased her nipple gently.  “I think Crows and Focuses should live together, but I don’t think many Crows will be following in our path, not any time soon.  Crows don’t trust Focuses.”

Gail lifted herself up on her elbows.  “Oh?  Why not?”

“Many years ago, the first Focuses betrayed…”

“Oh, hell,” Gail said.  “Figures.”

“I thought you weren’t going to interrupt anymore,”

“Whoops.  Sorry.”  Item number three on the Crow courtesy list, right after ‘don’t shout’, and ‘don’t make threats.’  “I’ve been talking over people my entire life.  It’s a hard habit to break.”

“Don’t worry too much; your enthusiasm for life is part of your appeal and your strength.  Anyway, many years ago, the first Focuses betrayed and killed two of the early Crows, and the Crows never forgot.  Even my students, the ones willing to take their dross from an Arm, even Newton, who’s willing to love Focus Hargrove, find the thought of
living
with a Focus to be terrifying.”

Gail shook her head at the idea that the Crows found Focuses as terrifying as Arms.  “Wait a minute.  Carol is supposed to protect you from me.  So what about if some Arm’s protecting the Crow?  Does that work?”

“No.  Only a few Crows are convinced the Arms are strong enough to defend them…and they don’t trust Kali.”  Gail gave him a quiet blank look.  “Keaton.  Whoever wins this contest between Keaton and the first Focuses, I think the Crows will be hiding for a long time.”

Depressing thoughts.  Gail sank back down on the bed and frowned.

“Can you tell me about what you teach?”

Gilgamesh turned away.  “Oh, a little this, a little that.”  Gail, remembering advice from Lori, waited patiently.

He shrugged.  “I specialize in Crow weaponry, household dross removal, and Arms.”

“What sort of weaponry?”

Gilgamesh frowned.  “I suppose weaponry isn’t quite the word for what I teach.  Mostly, I work in the area of long-term dross effects attached to objects.  Sometimes this means weaponry, but not always.  I also investigate unexplored Crow capabilities, such as the dross housecleaning skills, and I teach young Crows how to live near an Arm.”

“And other Crows come to learn from you?”

He nodded, and then turned away.  “I’ve been doing some of my advanced dross tricks in an attempt to help the household.”

Gail stiffened.  Despite their mutual tags, the idea of this being Gilgamesh’s household as well still bothered her.  “What sort of dross tricks?”

“You know how when you move into a new place, it usually takes a couple of months for the juice to start flowing properly.”

“Yeah.  Usually at first the flow isn’t smooth, and there are holes where it’s tough to move the juice, and others where it moves too fast, and a bunch of other problems involving metasense interference.  Then after a couple of months the juice settles out, and then you get just a few more months after that before the household starts going bad.  No trouble this time, though.”

Gilgamesh just looked at her.

“You arranged this?” Gail asked.

He nodded.  “For best juice flow, you need a layering of dross in the walls, floors and ceilings, but not too much.  I did a dross construct to spread the layering all over the household and set it in, so you didn’t have an adjustment period.  I made the dross construct layer slippery, allowing me to pick up the excess dross with ease.  I should be able to keep your household at optimum without a lot of trouble.”

Gail’s eyes opened wide.  “You can’t even imagine how wonderful this is.”  Never again to suffer through those miserable bad-house headaches, never needing to move just because part of the household went bad.  She had a looser relationship years ago with Crow Whisper, before he went off to be a Crow Master of Nobles, but although he had cleaned out her dross she still needed to move her household when things got bad.  Some places in the household just went bad, even if the entire household didn’t.

“Also,” Gilgamesh said, “I have a few other ideas.  The Branton is far too vulnerable and I would like to upgrade our defenses with tripwires, booby traps and other things.  I want to put illusions on our windows, so no one on the outside can see in.  Also, we need to protect at least some of the house from metasensing.”

“You can do all this?”

“I can do a lot.  Give me a couple of days to work with Sky and come up with a defense plan, and then we can show it to you and Connie.  If you like, we can start construction.”

Gail nodded, thinking of their many potential enemies.  “This sounds like a good idea,” she said.

“You think so?” he said.  Gail realized he shared her nervousness, much to her surprise.  She kissed him, and then kissed him harder.

“Yes, I think so.”

He smiled again, and this time the smile didn’t flicker away.  “Let me show you something,” he whispered, and held her close.  “Open yourself.  Share my metasense.”

Gail nodded, beyond pleased, as Gilgamesh had never offered to share metasenses with her before.  She did the mental shift.  “Oh!  Wow!  This is really far out.”  Very far out, as an entire new world opened up to her.  He could metasense for miles.

“Sense around,” he said.  “See our own household?  Just upstairs, you can sense Sky’s defenses, but defenses aren’t his specialty, and I can do better.”  She and Gilgamesh metasensed right through Sky’s defenses.  Sky and Lori argued.

He pointed his hand over toward the window.  “Now, metasense out a little further.  See over to the west?  That’s Linda Cooley’s household.”

“Who’s that?” Gail said, pointing to the northeast, over by Northwestern.  “Carol?  What’s she…”  Gail cut her question short and turned just slightly red as she realized exactly what Carol did.

“Van’s the person with her,” Gilgamesh said.

Gail startled, and then sat up in bed.  “Oh, hell.  That’s what I thought.  Is he all right?”

“Relax,” he said.  “Van’s fine.  I’ve been watching them, and Carol’s being good.  She just tagged him, and that means he’ll be okay.”

Gail wasn’t so sure she liked this at all.  Arranging for Melanie to trip up Van was one thing, Carol sleeping with him and tagging him was another.

“You don’t need to worry,” Gilgamesh said.  “He’s fine, and there’s nothing you can do about it in any case.  Metasense your household and examine their tags.”

Gail watched Carol with Van for a few moments longer before reluctantly pulling her attention away.  Carol wasn’t who she had pointed at Van, but under the circumstances, she couldn’t exactly complain.  An Arm would certainly be, well, entertaining.

She turned her attention to her household, where almost forty Transforms and nearly as many normals ate and slept and talked and worked.  “I sense them,” she said, enjoying the beauty of metasensing them both Focus-fashion and Crow-fashion.

“Metasense the tags on the Transforms, and how they interact with their juice structures.”

Gail nodded.  “They appear different than I’m used to.”

“This is what Sky’s document means when he talks about full juice structure analysis, and why full juice structure analysis uses a different terminology.  Working in this mode should allow us to tune their juice structures both faster and safer”

“Yeah.  I can metasense the details so much easier now.”  No wonder she had messed up during the first tuning pass.  She wanted to slap Sky for not requiring the Focus and Crow pair to do all their tuning work with shared metasenses.  His document definitely needed another revision before it went out to the general Focus and Crow population.

“Look at Jeff Casson and your other new people,” he said.  “Can you sense how your tags on them are different than the tags on the rest of your people?”

“Uh huh.  The new tags are sharper, somehow.”

Gilgamesh nodded.  “Yes.  You did the other tags when you were younger and less experienced.  The newer tags are much better.  I think if you simply refresh the older tags you’ll get a little more efficiency, maybe a couple of people’s worth, but I think we can do better.  I think we can get you to do an even cleaner tag if you practice a little and if I’m there to give you feedback.”

“That’s wonderful!  This is almost too easy.”

“The tuning isn’t the hard part, but understanding what tuning you need to do.  Also, examine the tags again.  You see how everyone has three tags, and how the tags subtly interfere with each other?”

Gail frowned.  “Interference?  I’m not metasensing any interference.”

“Well, I’ve been a Crow for six years now.  I possess a little more experience with my capabilities than you have,” Gilgamesh said, gently.