No Sorrow Like Separation (The Commander Book 5) (35 page)

After they finished circling the Clinic they cautiously headed toward Rogue Focus’s lair, this time through the parking lot of a newly constructed medical professional building.  Gilgamesh still hadn’t metasensed any Transforms on patrol or any juice patterns.  A quarter mile away they stopped, Tiamat agitated.

What? he signaled.  He had no desire to make an unnecessary sound so close to the Focus’s lair.

Metasense block, Tiamat signaled back.

He indicated that his wasn’t blocked.  She nodded.  Rogue Focus didn’t know how to stop the Crow metasense.

He couldn’t follow her hand signals as she tried to explain something.  He focused his metasense on Rogue Focus’s place and slowly started to metasense the juice patterns on the place, some exceedingly subtle.

Some he stood on.

Dammit.  He barely kept from sicking up in panic.

He signaled the fact they were standing on juice patterns to Tiamat before his panicky feet took him away, which they did.  She followed him with difficulty; he had to keep adjusting his path to keep within her metasense range.  She had a hard time metasensing him when he was this panicked, he knew.  He had to put work into keeping himself from going all crazy and running away from Tiamat.  His subconscious, it turned out, hadn’t quite bought into their closer relationship.

“Safe for now,” he said, a mile and a half out and hiding behind a Hi Lo Auto Supply.  “But five Transforms have just left Rogue Focus’s place, heading this way.  They’ve got quite a few juice patterns on them.”

Tiamat zipped over to where he hid by the garbage dumpster.  At least auto supply garbage didn’t reek like restaurant garbage.  “Keep an eye on the Clinic.  Rogue Focus doesn’t use metasense shields, she uses a metasense static trick.  I couldn’t make out anything inside her place with my metasense.”

Her emotions didn’t show worry, but aggression and cunning.  “You’ve got a nasty trick you want to pull?”

She nodded.  “I’m sure these five Transforms have normals with them.  I want to grab one of the normals.”  For information.  Not something a Crow would ever do, but her suggestion felt right.  He was falling more into the Arm mindset.

“How?”

“I’m going to gamble that Rogue Focus has the trick where she can give her household members some sort of metasense equivalent.”  They had learned from Lori that this was a common trick among the Focus witches.  The trick didn’t work well; the standard trick didn’t duplicate the metasense but gave the Transform the simple ability to sense the presence of a glow.  Focus witches also used juice patterns to extend their metasense range; what they stepped on earlier was likely the Focus Shaman equivalent of this standard trick.  “I want you to confuse them with your rotten eggs so I can swoop in on foot and grab a normal.”

A second group of Transforms, three in number, left the household.  Gilgamesh metasensed agitation.  He relayed this to Tiamat.

“I’ll try,” Gilgamesh said.  Tiamat wanted to find out how much she could depend on him.  He knew she had to push him, but he didn’t have to like being pushed.

“Do your best.  If you panic and can’t get back into my range we’ll meet back at the motel.”

He nodded and headed off toward the first group.  He told himself he was a stealthy Crow.  He couldn’t fool a Focus within her short metasense range, unless she was distracted, but he didn’t need to do that.  He hoped.  They had no idea of Rogue Focus’s age and talent level.  If she was powerful, well trained and nervy she might be masking herself enough to fool him.

He had been in worse danger, though that didn’t stop him from edging toward panic.  A car sped by on South Main a third of a mile away, speeding, loud.  That sent him into a short run to a safe place (an oleander hedge not yet recovered from winter) before he realized the driver wasn’t a Beast Man with a mad on.

Sweat dripping down his face and soaking through his shirt, he approached the first group Rogue Focus had sent out.  As Tiamat predicted, he found four normals with the five Transforms.  Gilgamesh took off his backpack and started lobbing tennis ball rotten eggs.  Woman Transform.  Fear.  Metasense scramble.  Confusion.  Sense of wonder (his latest version of Waveguide’s ‘spend money’ rotten egg).  As he tossed he moved, hiding behind cars, houses, trash bins and bushes, ending up on top of a low gently sloped garage.

The patrol milled around, confused, and as Tiamat hoped, scattered.  As one of the normals investigated the sense of wonder rotten egg, ignoring a barked order to fall in, Tiamat started a burn-fueled sprint toward him.

Damn she was fast.

Four groups of Transforms left the Clinic right after she started her sprint, one of the Transforms speaking into a walkie-talkie as Tiamat grabbed the normal, slowed, and ran off while laboring under the normal’s weight.  Not to Gilgamesh’s surprise, she plucked her captive’s weapons from him as she ran.

She had the captive, but her escape path also left her boxed in.

So was he.  Panic would soon force him out of Tiamat’s metasense range.  This was far too dangerous for him.

“Use your panic to your advantage,” the Skinner had told him.  Often.  With sneering emphasis.  “It’s a
weapon
, dammit!”

Perhaps he would be able to lead Tiamat out of this mess, anyway.

Carol Hancock: July 24, 1968

Gilgamesh ran into my metasense range and signaled that four more groups, from the Clinic, were out.

I wondered if Rogue Focus had planned this, setting up her first group as bait.  I couldn’t tell.  I slammed my squirming captive to the ground, gave him a dose of piss-loosing predator, picked up my now non-squirming captive and headed off.

My captive weighed as much as I did, which limited me to a jog over the long haul.  Gilgamesh fled, thank heavens.  I had held myself together, but the situation had been worse on me than on him.  He was mine, my delicate flower of a Crow, and risking him like this drove me crazy.  Or so my instincts said, instincts that hadn’t shown themselves to me until after I slept with him.  I hoped my all-night-lover hadn’t noticed my weakness.

I would train those instincts away or else.  I refused to give up sleeping with Gilgamesh because my unruly subconscious behaved like a six foot six Marine vet around his helpless beautiful buxom eighty-pound sedentary wife.

Captive didn’t have any juice patterns on him, according to my metasense.  He didn’t appear to have anything like Rizzari’s Transform training and his hand to hand abilities wouldn’t win him many normal bar fights, either.  I sure hoped to hell that he knew something, because otherwise this loser was nothing more than a nasty waste of time.

In front of me, a juice trace appeared out of nowhere.  I had never seen anything like it.  Monster?  I didn’t think Monsters left juice traces, though, as I had never seen one while out hunting.

I followed the trace, as the trace went the way I jogged.  I figured what was going on when I metasensed four more juice traces, in the shape of arrows, written on the ground beside the screwy juice trace I followed.

Ah.  Gilgamesh’s juice trace.  He improvised, which brought a smile to my face.  Crows didn’t leave juice traces…well, unless they wanted to.

I liked working with a partner who had real brains.  The four arrows pointed to the groups trying to box me in.  I made a mental map and took to the roofs, the dumpy houses in this old part of town being conveniently very close together.  To get to the roof with Captive I burned juice.  At this rate I would have to hunt soon.

Gilgamesh’s juice trace turned to the northeast, toward South Main and farther along toward Rice University.  The group behind me passed close by, now on wheels, circling and hunting.  Two houses farther along I metasensed a juice trace note: Focus.

The pedestrian approach wasn’t working.  They would get me eventually this way, no matter how canny I played this.  With Rogue Focus leading the hunt, I might actually be in real danger.

I waved my hands, assuming Gilgamesh was still close enough to metasense me.  Car.  North.  West.  Corner.  Rice.  U.

I slugged Captive unconscious, leapt down to street level, kicked car window glass, opened up the car, tossed Captive in, hotwired the car, and sped off.  South.

I picked up the Focus on my metasense almost immediately.  After running a red light I turned east, toward her, then at the edge of
her
metasense range I turned south, gunning the stolen vehicle.

My metasense tingled; Rogue Focus tried to do something to me when I passed by, briefly in range.  I inspected the car.  Yes.  Juice pattern in the shape of a vagina, just what I would expect from our Freudian Rogue Focus.  Four miles south I ditched the car, stole another, and circled widely around to pick up Gilgamesh.  I only had to roll by the northwest corner of the Rice campus twice before I caught Gilgamesh on my metasense and picked him up.

Thank the Lord.

---

“Carol, something’s wrong,” Gilgamesh said, as we pulled into the Sunshine Motel’s parking lot.  At the tone of his voice, I cruised through the parking lot and out the other side, stopping in the next-door Mobil station.

“What?”

“The Good Doctor’s not here.”

“How do you know this?”

“Metasense.  He should have a miniscule amount of dross in him, what his partly transformed adrenal gland should have produced today.  I can only sense his dross within a hundred yards or so” Focus-range, necessary for both Crows and Arms when we’re doing intricate metasense work “and he’s not anywhere nearby.”

“Trouble,” I said.  At 1:50 AM, Hank should be asleep.  I looked around with care, memories of the lead-up to the Chicago firefight that took me down echoing in my mind.  Yes.  Four of the cars in the Sunshine’s parking lot tweaked my instincts; all were the same make and model.  No Transforms – Gilgamesh would have mentioned that.  From the license plates on the four cars, local Houston cops.  “Plainclothes detectives,” I said, my most reasonable guess.

Gilgamesh sighed.  “You don’t want to run, do you?”

I shook my head.  “Roof time.”  I parked my ride behind the gas station, out of sight of the Sunshine’s parking lot.  I also made sure I had Captive tightly tied and gagged in the back seat of my ride, and tossed a blanket over him.  I led Gilgamesh to the back fence of the motel.  Up and over, then up on the low slope of the motel roof. We crouched low, so our profiles didn’t become visible from the road.

“Seven in our room, one out front,” Gilgamesh said, whispering.

I concentrated on my sense of smell, and my hearing.  “They don’t realize they’re after an Arm,” I said, whispering back.  The detectives carried nothing but their normal service weapons.

This had to be Focus Peshnak’s work.  Based on our research, she had Fed connections, and so I predicted the Feds would be arriving soon, to take over, or as backup.  Would she have told the Feds to watch out for an Arm?

I suspected not.  Doing so would invite too many questions about
her
.

The adrenaline shock of a plan going bad washed out of me, replaced by a growing livid anger.  The hotel room was
mine!
  My lair, in my territory!  Nobody violated my territory!

Gilgamesh pulled away.  “Carol, ma’am?”

“Hank and the rest are on foot.”  Hank’s ride was still in the Sunshine’s lot.  “Find them, please.”  I tried to keep the predator out of my voice, but I didn’t succeed.  Not fully.  “Can you take the car?”  The car with Captive in the back.

He shook his head, stopped and thought, wincing at the end.  “I must,” he said, shaky and wary.  Too much Tiamat from me, alas.  In this situation, though, I couldn’t properly damp my emotions.

“Find the rest, if you can.  If you can cope, get them to our emergency meet in Conroe,” I said.  Next town to the north.  “If you can’t, find a way to get my attention.  I have some work to do.”

Gilgamesh shivered and vanished, through fast movement and metasense shielding.  He knew exactly what I was about to do, and he didn’t want to be here when I did it.

I waited, barely able to hold in my anger, until I heard Gilgamesh drive off.  Then I crept over the peak of the roof, and leapt over the edge, above the door to my room.  I used one hand to twist around, in the process kicking out at the one detective waiting on the walkway outside of the room.  He went flying one way, his weapon the other.  He would need hospital care, and soon.

I was through the door to the hotel room before he hit the ground.  I came in high, and stayed high, and
burned
.  They had been waiting for me, with the lights off, bad for them.  Time slowed as it does in combat, as I kicked one in the head, the second in the center of his chest, broke the arm and elbowed the side of the head of the third as he readied to shoot me.  I was running out of time for the easy fight I wanted – killing the cops would attract too much attention and likely force me out of Houston permanently.  I switched to disarming attacks on the last four, the seventh and last a large problem because he was short, squat and nearly as well muscled as me.  I grabbed his trigger finger as he tightened it, about to shoot me in my left shoulder.  He ended up with broken and dislocated fingers.