No Sorrow Like Separation (The Commander Book 5) (22 page)

I moved my hand along her cheek and she flinched.

“You won’t give me any trouble, now will you?” I said, my voice soft.

She shook her head.

“You will do everything that I want.  You will obey my every order.  If you cause me trouble in any way, I will hurt you.  Again.  Worse.  Do you understand?”

She nodded, tears still leaking from her eyes.

We had an understanding.

Then we left the clinic together.

---

Me and my entourage arrived at Keaton’s house at about eight at night after a long circuitous trip through four cities on three different air carriers and a stop at my safe house in Oakland to pick up Frances.  No Gilgamesh, alas.  No Keaton at her house.  I had called her four times and gotten nothing.  I was about to take my frustration out on my companions when Keaton appeared in my metasense about six hundred feet down the road.  In the house next door, Keaton’s house of pain.  I hadn’t realized I could pick up ‘pissed Arm’ through my metasense, but I did now.  She stood on the front porch, arms on her hips, and steamed.

I examined the situation, weighed options, and came to a decision.  I tossed Raindorf the car keys, a wad of twenties, and told him and Frances to check into a nearby motel and stay out of trouble.  In Keaton’s mood, she would chew them up like hamburger.  I turned to Hank, signaled him to stay with me, and grabbed my problem child by the shoulder.  We strode across the lawn, around a fence, and down the hill to Keaton’s house of pain.

When I reached the front porch I bowed deeply, went down on one knee and reaffirmed that I was hers, my hand still holding tightly to the shoulder of my problem child.  “Ma’am, I beg your pardon for dropping in on you unexpectedly.  I wish to formally present to you former doctor Henry Zielinski, the newly transformed Amy Haggerty, who I absconded with four hours after she awoke from her transformation coma, and my first box of pertinent personal information on her.”  Care of the efficient Inferno household.  I was running up a large tab with them.  They hadn’t been happy when I told them I wouldn’t be giving them their Doc Pain back, either.

I did like the nickname they gave Zielinski.  Inferno had class.

My new charge’s jaw dropped at my groveling, but I didn’t care.  There were priorities, and my relationship with Keaton was more important than Haggerty’s delicate sensibilities.  Besides, she would learn how to bow and scrape soon enough.  If Keaton didn’t kill her first.

Zielinski simply nodded to Keaton.  Keaton wiggled an eyebrow back at him in return.  Wonderful.  The Society of the Dancing Eyebrows.  I knew way too many members.

“Thank God,” Haggerty said, practically throwing herself at Keaton.  “This bitch Arm’s been abusing me ever…”

Slam.  Punch.  Haggerty tumbled in a tangle of arms and legs, to land half-conscious against the far railing.  Twenty-five feet, the full length of the front porch.  Damn.  I owed Hank a grand.  I had predicted Keaton wouldn’t toss her more than twenty feet.

“Talk to me, Hancock,” Keaton said, “and this had better be good.  I specifically told you not to show up here until you grabbed control of your new territory.  Is it to be Boston or Houston?”

“Ma’am,” I said, respectfully, from my place on the porch floor.  “Houston.  The matter which forced my early arrival is this new Arm here.  If you don’t want her, I’ll gladly kill her.”

“Carol,” Zielinski said, voice low.  Exasperated.  We were both trying his patience and the limits of his tag regarding Haggerty.

Keaton frowned at the barely conscious Haggerty.  “What do you know, she is an Arm.  I thought she was some kind of fucked up Focus.  I’ve never metasensed one this new.”

“Ma’am,” I said.  “I’m sorry, but I don’t have all the required information yet.  This box has all her high school and college records, though.”

Keaton waved her hand at me, stalked over to Haggerty, picked her up and tossed her through the open door into her second house.  She smiled at the two of us.  “Well, well.  Come in, come in…”

From the basement echoed a dreadful scream.

“Monster,” Keaton said.  “I’m trying to figure out what makes a Monster tick.  Hope you can keep control of your kill lust.”  Then Keaton laughed her most sadistic laugh and kicked the door closed behind us.  Shit.  Keaton wasn’t high on juice; this could turn out to be dangerous for us, as my juice monkey also clawed at my mind.  Zielinski paled as Keaton turned on him and ran a sharp fingernail under his chin.  “Don’t worry, Hank.  None of this is for you.  This time…”

Hank thought Keaton had tortured him in the past.  I hadn’t been sure this had been torture from Keaton’s rather expert perspective.  Guess it was.  That wouldn’t be happening again.  Hank was mine, now.

Keaton turned back to me, glaring and tapping her fingers on her crossed arms. We locked eyes, and she went over every spoken word of mine, every nuance, every body sign possible to notice.  I waited, attempting to project subservience and competence.

I hoped she liked what she saw because I wasn’t hiding anything.  My few days with Zielinski had done wonders for my mind.  I could think again, not to mention read and write.  The world made logical sense.  Mostly.  I could reason, plan, and comprehend cause and effect.  No more living by rituals and instinct.  Gaah.  That had been horrible.  Save me from any more encounters with magic.

“Good,” she said, her evaluation finished.  “You appear to be Arm enough to talk to, again.  That’s making good use of Zielinski.  Tell me about what’s been going on.  This better be good, or you’re going to spend some time in the basement for interrupting
my
work.”

I let myself go a little pale at her threat.  She sneered back at me.  I had overdone my reaction and she recognized the sham.  I widened my eyes a tad, and flickered my sight on Zielinski.  I indicated what I had done with Zielinski was worth risking a trip to the basement.  She splayed her fingers, a sign she would listen and bargain.

I went into the living room and sat on a stool, portraying humble and abject Carol.  After I got a look at her face, I decided I had better ease off.  I was proud of my squeaky-clean Boston snatch and Inferno’s help with the records.  Acting humble wasn’t appropriate.

I finally pegged Keaton at a mid-range juice count.  Her temper came from the fact we interrupted her work, not from low juice, thank God.

“Talk,” Keaton said, sitting on her easy chair, a duplicate of the one she had in her main house. Haggerty didn’t move from her position in the corner.  “Stand,” she said to Zielinski.  “Observe and think.”

I talked.  I told her everything I knew about Haggerty.  Keaton shrugged.  Brains were a plus; her SDS connections and her mental image of Arms as do-gooder avengers of the night in comic book costumes a decided minus.  Keaton shook her head in disgust.  Haggerty would either shape up or die before she would take any of the kills I would be providing.  Well, maybe I would at least get brownie points for supplying entertainment.

“Have you and Hank had a chance to come up with any ideas about your research center proposal?” she said.  Impatiently.  Her games with her basement Monster aroused her.

“Some.  Houston’s got the best resources for what we need.  Hank has a list of potential recruits for me to investigate.  He’s willing to be the background boss in a new identity.”  I turned to Hank.  “Did you finish the preliminary budget scenarios?”

He nodded.  Crap like this he could do in his sleep.

Keaton looked at Zielinski.

“Your relationship with Hank here is the same as mine is to you, isn’t it?” I nodded.  “What does it take?  You make any progress understanding what’s going on?”

“Yes, ma’am.”  I told her Zielinski’s comment about ‘down to the soul’ and why tagging normals would be harder because they didn’t have any juice.  “It fits all my limited experiences with tagging.”

“Well, then, I guess you haven’t earned yourself a trip to the basement,” she said.  She stood and walked over to the window, staring out into the darkness for a long moment.  The Monster in the basement howled again, intermixed with a few choice curses.  Shit!  She had a talker!  Keaton was poaching on the Chimeras again.  I approved.

Keaton turned to Zielinski.

“Eissler?”

I had forgotten to make sure Hank was ready.  Damn.

“We met for less than four hours,” he said, without a pause.  “What I learned will take approximately two hours to present, not counting any questions you may have.  A chalkboard to write on might be handy.  The information is hot enough that the first Focuses have a contract out on my life, presumably to keep the two of you from learning what I am about to say.  Eissler played an Arm trick on me making it such that I couldn’t tell anyone else what I learned except for the two of you.  I believe what I have to say is going to change your world.”  I breathed a needless sigh of relief.  I kept forgetting Hank taught hot shit doctors.  At Harvard, for gosh sakes.  He didn’t need my advice.

Keaton turned back to me.

“Hancock, let’s see what sort of physical progress you’ve made in your recovery,” she said.  “Hank, maybe you can help me make some sense out of what happened to Hancock here.”  I hadn’t been neglecting the physical aspects of my recovery.  Not when recovery was Keaton’s top priority task and vital to my survival.

Zielinski and I followed Keaton downstairs.  On the way by, Keaton stopped by where the temporarily un-tortured Haggerty still lay on the floor.  Haggerty’s face remained white as a sheet.

“If you move one inch from where you are now, I will carve off small pieces of your body until your mind snaps.  Do you understand me?”

Haggerty nodded.  I picked up the dank smell of fear rolling off her.  She had heard the Monster in the basement, and everything Keaton, Zielinski and I said.  She knew her life was in Keaton’s hands.

We exercised our way hungry, or at least Keaton and I did.  The only comment of Zielinski’s that made any sense to me was the one about chemical tells: I picked up on Keaton’s physical movements without looking, by sensing the different juice fractions let loose by her physical actions.  Keaton wasn’t overjoyed until she picked up on the trick as well, after fifteen minutes of experimentation.  This wasn’t a metasense function.  I could do this trick even when Keaton masked herself from my metasense, an advanced trick she was working on but didn’t have perfected.  Zielinski was way too enthralled by the Monster chained in the corner of the basement to be dishing out his normal volume of disquieting observations.  Of all things, he made progress taming the damned thing.  It looked like a goddamned courting ritual.

I had Zielinski go fetch the coolers from the car, my cooking supplies.  I knew better than to trust Keaton’s kitchen, though I hadn’t realized how much of a handicap I would be laboring under, having to cook in her house of pain.  Still, in twenty minutes, we had the semblance of a home cooked meal ready to eat for a midnight snack.  For poor Hank, a two in the morning snack, as his normal’s body still thought we should be in Oklahoma.

After we ate, she looked at me, thought about the planning necessary for the meal, looked at Zielinski, and then looked back at me.

“Go to bed,” she told Zielinski, and tossed him a key to her mansion.  “Hancock and I have some dirty security details to discuss.”

“…but I expect that I can get most of them. The risks and rewards work out right.  There are many different ways of recruiting, and you have to tailor your method to the person.”  I hated having to explain my recruiting.  I recruited by gut and instinct, always hard to translate into words.  I knew most, if not all, of the researchers would fold up for me, but how could I explain my instincts to Keaton?

“What level of control are you talking about?  Hank, Frances the druggie, or that piece of muscle you didn’t want me to notice?”

“Ma’am,” I said, and bowed my head, acknowledging the hit.  Thank heavens for the tag; in the old days, given my relatively low juice count, I might have snarled at her.  “It’s not the same, for several reasons.  Hank, Frances and Fred are
mine
mine, personally bound to me as part of my entourage, and are all tagged.  Hank is voluntarily part of our cause, I saved Frances from herself and Fred, well, I broke him to me.  I’m their world to them.

“On the other hand these researchers are old and settled with families they care for.  These are leverage points we can use.  Also, I won’t be making a significant disruption in their lives.  They’ll still continue their research, they’ll still support their families, and even live perfectly normal lives except for the work they do for me.  Lastly, I have something to offer them.  These men give their whole lives to research Transform Sickness and its peculiarities.  Most have never had a real live Major Transform to work with and certainly not a mature one.  I’d bet several of them will be willing to sell me their souls just for that chance.  I’ll get these people and keep them.  But they won’t be tagged.”

Keaton smiled sardonically. “Tell me, what happens when you have all these researchers learning all sorts of things about Arms and one of them breaks under pressure?  Special delivery, straight to the FBI, everything they want to know about Arms, and about your research organization besides.”

“Ma’am,” I said again.  I didn’t have an answer for her, so I tossed the question back.  “Ma’am, do you think that’s an insurmountable problem?  Or do you see a way around that?”