The Forgefires of God (The Cause Book 3) (25 page)

“What about your loyalty to Patterson?”

“Are you going to defeat her?”

I nodded and she looked away.

“I hate her,” she said.

“No you don’t.”

Elspeth didn’t answer.  I looked her over thoughtfully.  Too many odd emotions ran through her, all tied up with Patterson.  I recognized most of them.  On me, with Keaton.  On Tonya, with Patterson.

“You want to hate her, but she owns you,” I said.

Elspeth nodded.

“How long?”

“I met her for the first time a week after the escape from the Quarantine.  I’d been a Focus for less than six months.”  Fourteen years.  Not good.

“You can break free of her.  Biggioni did.”

She smiled just a little and looked at the chains that held her.  Freedom wasn’t exactly wandering around in abundance down here.  I shrugged.  What could I say?  I wasn’t going to unlock the chains.  Patterson could take over Elspeth long-distance at any time, I knew from my experiences with Tonya.

“So, do I belong to you now?”

I raised an eyebrow.  “Do you want to?”

“I heard the call from your person, the one who said Patterson had captured Arms Keaton, Bass and Rayburn.  You’re in charge now, ma’am.”

“Could be,” I said.  “Assuming I succeed in taking down Patterson.”

“So now I work for you.  What do you plan to do to my mind and body?”

I enjoyed possessing her, but she seemed a bit too eager.  I kept my expression under firm control as my emotions swung between the lust of possession and the snarls of paranoia.  Fourteen years, her entire Transform life, and she had been under Patterson’s control.  Not the straightforward hierarchy of an Arm tag, and not even the odd household ownership of a Focus tag, but something of Patterson’s twisted design.

Elspeth thought she needed to be owned to be free.  Such a sad Focus, but wise, very wise, all reflected in a once beautiful juice structure, ruined by years of ownership.  She was right.  We wouldn’t leave the first Focuses free to work their schemes again.  For most of them, it would be the loss of a freedom they didn’t deserve.  For Elspeth, we would deny her the freedom she never had.

At least, I promised myself, I would use her better than Patterson.  I told her so.

She nodded.  “Is there something I need to do to make it official?”

“Just say the words: ‘I’m yours’.”

“I’m yours,” she said.

The juice moved.

I held her in my arms as we lay on my bed, and she nestled comfortably against me, long and lean, looking around my fallback bedroom in my warehouse, and not at all appalled by the remaining paraphernalia on the walls.

“Why did you bring me up here?”  She thought I planned on sleeping with her, but I hadn’t yet.

“There’s a little problem,” I said.  The short day had progressed to evening, Gail was in the Dreaming, guarding my mind, and the room was comfortably dim, blurring the harshness of my bedroom into softness.  I worried attack plans in my head, juggling numbers and contingencies.  I also worried about Rose and Giselle, who should have snagged Keaton’s student Arms by now.  They hadn’t reported in, and nobody answered at Keaton’s place.  Trouble, yes, but what sort of trouble?

I pulled a pillow under Cathy’s head, so she could be comfortable.  I had let her shower and change, and her odor was of fresh soap now instead of fear.  She wore one of my extra shirts and a pair of jeans.  Both hung baggy on her.  She was beautiful, with rich blonde hair that shimmered as she moved, deep blue eyes, and a juice structure laced with old scars.  No, she had no personal capabilities besides her charisma, not with a juice structure so ill-used.

Why did Focuses always have such beautiful hair?

“Problem?”

“Problem.  You’re still wearing Patterson’s tag and we need to get rid of it.”

“What?”  She frowned, and some of her hard edges showed, the immensity of her charisma now peeking through.  “She has a
tag
on me?”

I nodded.  “It’s probably been there for the last fourteen years.  The tag’s well hidden, but I’ve seen Patterson’s tags before, and it’s real tough to hide tags from a knowledgeable Arm.”

Cathy grimaced in disgust.  “Yes, let’s get rid of it.  How?”

“Tags on Major Transforms need to live in the subconscious to last, but in most cases you can remove them by willing them away.  Patterson’s tags, though, aren’t ‘most cases’.  They fight back.  Removing the tag is going to be painful, and will leave you feeling miserable.”

“I don’t care.  I want it off.”

“That’s a good start.  Lay here and focus your will and let’s see if you can shuck the tag without my help.”  As I suspected, she failed.  We shared metasenses and tried, together, and failed, even with me burning juice into my tag on her.  Nothing.

“Are there moments when you feel like you’ve forgotten something, a missing moment or two?” I asked.  Tonya’s forgotten phone conversations.  My lack of memories of Gail and Van’s warnings about Patterson getting to me in the Dreaming.  I suspected something along those lines.

Cathy blinked in surprise.  “How did you know?”  She sighed.  “Most of the time, it’s just a few minutes here and there, but sometimes…” she paused “days.”

Days.  Fuck.  I sensed Gail banging around in my head, through the Dreaming, and I followed her hints, which led me and my metasense to a place inside Cathy’s brain, where I found a feedback loop preserving the tag, a devious construction down in Elspeth’s subconscious, short-circuiting her attempts to shuck the tag.

Hell and damnation.  Even with Gail’s help during the Haggerty challenge, I had needed to burn twelve points of juice to shuck Patterson’s tag on me, and that one hadn’t been put on me in person, but long-distance, piggybacking on top of Bass’s false Arm tag.

And this one had sat on Elspeth for nearly fifteen years.  Still, I would be damned if I would let one of Patterson’s foul tags beat me.

I sat cross-legged on my bed and leaned forward with my elbow on my knee and my chin in my hand.  Elspeth sat against the headboard and looked about ready to tear her hair out.

That would have been sad.  Her hair was such a beautiful dark gold.

“I’ve got an idea if you want to try something risky,” I said.

“Anything.”

“The tag is too deep into your will.  You can’t fight it, but I can.  To do that, you need to hand your will over to me.”

“How?”

“Right now, I’ve got a full tag on you.  If you let me give you a stronger tag, I’ll take over more of your will.  In that case, there’s a possibility I can fight off the tag.”

“So I lose my own free will?  Forever?”

I hesitated.  “I don’t think so. I should be able to set the tag back when I’m done, but no one’s ever done this kind of tag before.  It’s a risk.”

She leaned her head back against the headboard and closed her eyes.  Her hair fell in waves around her.

“Do it.”

“You ready?”

“I’m ready.  You should do it before I change my mind.  I’m yours, a lot more than I am already.”

I fiddled with the tag for just over a minute before I found a way to up the amplitude.  The juice moved and the double tag took.

And oh, damn was this good.  She was mine.  Not just a little mine, but
mine
.  This would be real tough to give up.

I recognized the double tag, though.  The double tag was what Gail slapped on me in the Fight in Detroit, a double Focus-Focus tag.  No wonder she had been able to cobble together an instinctive juice pattern to give me access to the juice in her juice buffer.  Crap.  All our work, for nothing.  If I had known about double tags, I could have solved the mystery in a week.  Save for one thing: what Arm, in her right mind, would submit to being double tagged by any Focus?  Some things the world doesn’t need to know about…

Elspeth stared at me slack-jawed. 
Love,
I sent down the pipe, the beautiful wide pipe able to convey so much.  We didn’t need words.  Elspeth crawled over to me and held me tight, happy as a baby in the bliss of her mother’s arms.  I held her gently and kissed her head, this child I loved so much.

Too intense, even for me.  I wouldn’t be able to maintain the double tag for long.

“All right,” I said.  “Are you ready?”  The weathered strain on her face vanished and the muscles on her face relaxed into peace.

“Yes.”  Of course she said yes.

“Shuck the tag,” I said, and added my will to hers.  She had such an impressive will, such an iron self-control, and when Patterson’s tag was gone…

Damn, this was one nasty tag.  I metasensed the tag clearly now, twined deep into her juice structure, and recognized the mess as a more primitive version of Patterson’s long-distance parasite tag, set up to reinforce itself instead of demanding love and responsibility from the tag-holder, the same as Bass’s false Arm tag.  That stunk.

I burned a bit of juice into my metasense to understand the details, as something about this felt familiar.  But what?  I searched my memories until I made the connection – this resonated with the tricks Focus Peshnak had used, the Focus I once gleefully renamed ‘Rogue Focus’ before I captured her and removed her from Houston four and a half years ago.  This parasite tag didn’t use witch techniques, but Focus Shaman technology, the same damned technology that had turned me into ‘magical thinking Carol’ in mid melee.  Shitfuck!  Patterson possessed the Focus Shaman technology in fucking
1958
, in addition to her juice pattern mastery!  No wonder she beat Keaton.  Even with everyone at my disposal going in with me, I was going to lose, because I was going up against something
different
.  I needed more.  I needed my own
different
.

“Carol, there’s something I need to tell you,” Cathy said.

She rested in my arms, both of us drenched in sweat, both of us skating far too close to periwithdrawal for comfort.  I felt Gail in the back of my mind, still in the Dreaming, and probably down as far on juice as the two of us.  Cathy and I had taken a full half hour to pry out all the tendrils of Patterson’s parasite tag, hashing up Cathy’s juice structure in the process, and likely doing a number on my own.  Gail and whoever else she had recruited had spent the entire time in the Dreaming, guarding my mind from the expected pokes and prods.

We all succeeded, though.

“I suspect there’s a lot you’re going to need to tell me,” I said.  I would save the necessary mind scrape until after Cathy recovered.  She might not have been part of the ruling circle of Firsts, but she had been their Council rep and catspaw for years.  She knew nearly everything.

“Arm Bass isn’t what you think she is.”

The world froze around me at Cathy’s unexpected words.  Gail screamed in my head, assaulted by Patterson in the Dreaming.  I banished my momentary terror and did what I could to will the panicking Patterson away through my tag link to Gail.

“Tell me.”

“She isn’t Fingleman or Patterson’s victim.  She’s Patterson’s
student
.”

Oh holy fuck.  Now everything made sense to me, all my darkest fears and worries, and Bass’s impossible tricks that never made sense to me before.

Bass wasn’t just a traitor, she was a Shaman-style Arm.

Cathy laid it out for me, a chilling tale beyond my darkest nightmares.  I took the precaution of calling Van and Daisy, and getting our two Major Transform groupies and safely normal and non-Transform types over to my house to take notes.  Gail survived Patterson’s attack, and with me half-asleep I recognized some of her helpers, including Lori, Rumor, and the Madonna’s bear, along with several other unknowns.  Privacy?  No, not for me, not now.  They hung around and listened, with my blessing and active help.  We absolutely needed not to
forget
this.

The only one happy to be in my warehouse bedroom right now, though, was Daisy, distracted by the various tools hanging from my walls.

Cathy condensed what she had told me and repeated the sodden tale for Van and Daisy, starting with how Focus Julius earned her living – literally – these days, as Patterson’s front and cutout for Chrysanthemum.  Chrysanthemum was
Patterson’s
.

“Patterson found her holy tags” Patterson’s term for her parasite tags “didn’t work on Arms long term,” Cathy said, five minutes in.  She snuggled close to me on the big bed and stroked my arm gently.  “Arms are too stubborn and always find a way to shake loose from their tags, each in her own way.  She’s possessed all of you, from Keaton on down to Bass, at one point or another.  Never for very long.”

Daisy frowned and shook her head.  She came over to me, sat beside me, and rubbed my shoulders.  I didn’t object, not from one of mine.  I appreciated the comfort she radiated.  Cathy watched her suspiciously, but relaxed when I didn’t seem to mind.

When I tagged Bass in her lair, Bass and Patterson had done a shaman trick, allowing Patterson to use my tag on Bass to get past my normal defenses, corrupting my dreams and giving my nightmares power.