The Forgefires of God (The Cause Book 3) (34 page)

“What is your opinion, philosophically, regarding the other Transforms?”  Our short conversation was enough to allow me to easily read her.  I wanted to know her real opinion.  After the captive Focus parade, the fight with Bass, the long truck chase, ending with a senior Crow intervention, she could have some rather low opinions of our fellow Major Transforms.

“Arm Keaton’s plan was self-serving, and she willfully ignored the effect of her plan on our chances of surviving the Transform Apocalypse, and the effect the Transform Apocalypse would have on her plans and desires.  Arm Bass and her plans were and are evil and despicable.  I’ve never met a Focus in a proper situation.  I recently talked to a Crow I never saw, had one senior Crow ignore me as if I didn’t exist, and another one talk to me and make me forget the conversation ever happened.  I’m not sure I appreciate Crows.  I’ve never met a Chimera of any variety, and so I don’t know enough to judge, one way or the other.

“Ma’am, I can offer you information, based on some things Arm Bass said: Arm Bass wished to subvert the Hunters and hunt down and destroy the Nobles.  She found the concept of predators serving a non-predator master to be offensive.  My post-chase analysis is this: first, she’ll try to grab the Arms from you, ma’am, something you already countered by drawing all the Arms here.  Second, she’s not going to challenge you or wage any form of fair fight against you.  Instead, she’s going to go after the Arm territories west of the Mississippi, since the Arms aren’t there to protect them, and plunder them until nothing is left worth taking.  Thirdly and lastly, she’s going to buy her way into the Hunter organization using her plunder.”

I growled at her comments about Bass while showing her that I appreciated her Haggerty-worthy analysis.  I hadn’t thought of the plunder idea, but it made sense, especially Keaton’s territory.  She had hundreds, if not thousands, of normals working for her, most indirectly.  Her net worth was in the tens of millions, and Bass had been too close to Keaton for too many months, too recently.  If Bass couldn’t walk off with a quarter of Keaton’s people and net worth, I would be shocked.

So, yes, Sokolnik was smart, in addition to everything else.  Her philosophy was acceptable to me, and I judged her teachable.  I bet her metasense was good, too.

“Here’s the deal,” I said, deciding to take a page from Webberly’s book.  “I’ll tag you, right here and now.  In the fight, you’ll be my personal aide and bodyguard.  You’re not ready to work independently in a fight like this.  In addition, I want you to release the Arms you’ve tagged to Rose.  You’ll be required, after the fight, to spend ten hours a month for the next year with Dr. Henry Zielinski or his designated researchers in our ongoing Arm research effort.  I agree to respect you as a graduate Arm, but I’m also postponing the official tagging ceremony, where I present you to my other Arms, until you demonstrate mastery of Arm combat to the recognized level.  I will require no other graduation payment.”

I studied Sokolnik carefully.  My deal wasn’t a good one, and I asked her to give me everything she owned for the privilege of wearing my tag.  Giving up the tags of the Arms she had picked up would hurt, especially Bartlett’s tag.  Requiring her to demonstrate mastery of Arm combat, and not officially offering her any training, would be galling.  I intended this part of the offer to be insulting.

I wanted to see how smart she was.  Could she figure out that I would be training her, even if the training wasn’t part of my official deal?  Or that her Bass worries were now over?  For whatever reason, she considered Bass a mortal enemy, her personal nemesis.  Would I need to get into Arm primitive behaviors, as with Billington, to earn her respect?  I hoped not, as she didn’t see ‘bunny suit Carol’ when she saw me; instead, she saw an older version of Webberly.  I needed to learn Sokolnik’s personality, quickly, if she was going to be my aide in the fight.

In response to my demands, she immediately knelt at my feet and offered up her hands for me to take.  I took them, and felt her raw power and immense potential through the physical link.  No wonder she had been able to tag the other Arms.  There was nothing wrong with the strength of Sokolnik’s predator effect, not at all.  All she needed was the training and the experience.  “I am yours,” Sokolnik said.  My offer, insulting as it was, was far better than any other offers she had received.  Yet another of Keaton’s mistakes.

“You are mine.”

---

“Fucking bitch,” Billington said.  After Sokolnik’s warning, I called Grace, Rose, and Christine Naylor to my room in the Lodge.  Neither Rose nor Christine had owned their territories, San Francisco and Denver, long enough to have built up resources worth looting.  Grace, though…

Bass, in Dallas, had lived too close to Grace’s Houston home for too long.  “How much?”

“She took everything!”  A few minutes of meditation on her territory had given her the bad news.  The steam of anger practically rose from her curly black hair.

“Were you working with Focus Laswell?”  Grace nodded.  When I lived in Houston, I had worked extensively with Focus Thelma Laswell, and still did, occasionally.  She had an excellent sense for money.  “You’d better call.”

Grace did.  After a long conversation filled with invective, I got to make my first of many ‘Bass apologies’ and my first tough call as Arm boss.  Bass had told Thelma to turn over Grace’s fallback accounts to her; when Thelma refused Bass kidnapped, tortured and killed one of Thelma’s Transforms – and sent him back to her in pieces.  Thelma then capitulated, and now her people were holed up and shooting at shadows.

“I’m sure she’s already gone,” I said, to Thelma, after another apology and a reassurance that Bass was my enemy as well.  “She’s pillaging all the reachable Arm territories, including Keaton and Rayburn’s.  In Arm time.  She can’t stand still or take too much time with any task, or I or my people will catch up to her.”

I also warned her about Donna Fingleman, which she thanked me for.  Donna owned Thelma’s blackmail levers, and would likely attempt to use them to help save herself.  Thelma only wished we had taken down Donna years ago.

My first tough call?  I gave the kill order on Bass.  “She’s officially a rogue Arm, and fair game.  Be careful though.  She’s a senior Arm, and won’t be easy to kill, even if you get the drop on her.”

Blood-soaked Darkness
December 24, 1972

Denise Pitre – Focus #13 – March 1957.  Focus Pitre is known for her charity work in the San Jose area, where she lives, as well as extensive work promoting the Focus Network in California.  She and her household run a family counseling center.  “I’d found that instead of engaging in Transform politics, I’d rather do something productive and good with my life,” she told this author.

“Lives of the Focuses”

Tonya Biggioni

Tonya awoke with a start, dream screams echoing in her mind.  Before she realized what she was doing, she was out of bed, moving, waking her people up.  As she knotted her robe tight, she grabbed the night’s bodyguards, Mark, Antoine, Danny and Delia, and took off at a run down the hallway of the lodge.  The screams weren’t all in her head; muted screams echoed from the floor above.  She took the stairway three steps at a time, and in the process overtook an indistinct presence moving much more slowly up the steps.  As she passed the presence, it morphed into one of Tonya’s currently absent bodyguards, Russell, who winked at her, and joined her crew.

Shadow.  Good.

Tonya sensed dying Transforms and a Focus in deep trouble.  She originally thought the noise came from the Commander’s quarters, but once she reached the top of the stairs, she saw the disturbance came from the room next door.  Cathy Elspeth’s room.  Tonya wanted to scream ‘not Cathy’, but waited, juice patterns at the ready.  At her signaled orders, her bodyguards drew their weapons and ran ahead.  Tonya followed at a slightly slower trot, Shadow and Delia at her side.

Mark and Danny burst open the door, and then quickly and improbably stepped to the side as the body of an eviscerated Transform flew out the door head-high to smack bloodily on the opposite wall of the hallway.  Delia, at Tonya’s side, wasn’t fast enough to avoid being hit by the Transform’s guts.  She ran her hand across her face, whimpered a stifled scream and put herself in front of Tonya, blocking the way, forcing Tonya to stop.  Tonya looked in the room, grimaced and attempted to understand the tableau of horror in front of her and block off her own instinctive ‘ewwww’ reaction.

The stench of gun smoke and death assaulted Tonya’s nose as it rolled out of the room, and as Tonya stood outside the doorway, the sound of one last gunshot echoed out.  Delia moved Tonya to the side.  About five seconds later, Tonya felt a hot juice pattern, followed by a metasense burst that staggered her, and the sudden appearance of a cloud of polluted juice and dross.

The élan explosion from the death of a Focus.

Ahead of her, Mark, her bodyguard, lost his composure.  Despite the abundant juice she pumped into him, he twisted to the side and spewed his midnight snack over floor and corpses.  Tonya wanted to follow suit herself; this was as bad as Keaton’s worst.  She gritted her teeth and forced herself to move to the doorway into the room. Delia didn’t waver from her position in front of Tonya.

“What’s the meaning of this!” Tonya said, as she took in the gore-dripping room.  Lori and Carol turned to her, both covered in blood.  They were the only ones left standing in the room.  Men and women littered the floor, messily dead.  The bed was covered by people, Transforms of many varieties, not dead, but many wounded.  Parts of several corpses hung from the draperies, half open doors, and the ceiling light fixture.  Blood dripped from the doorjamb surrounding Tonya.  Juice patterns, some of them quite deadly, filled the air, in the process of starting their decay.  The pooled blood in the room began to roll out the doorway, around three corpses that dammed the gore. Tonya’s slippers slowly grew red.

“They tried to kidnap me.”  Cathy Elspeth’s voice, from underneath several bodies, on the bed.  Now things started to make sense.  Those were Inferno bodyguard bodies on top of Cathy, wounded but alive.  Protecting her.  Tonya shook, and relaxed an iota when her conscious mind finally realized the dead Focus wasn’t Cathy and not one of Carol’s own.  This wasn’t an Arm having a psychotic break.  There had been enemy action here.  There was at least some rational thought behind this egregious violence.

Carol snarled and didn’t otherwise answer Tonya’s question.  Instead, she bent down and hacked the head off another Transform, then picked up the corpse and tossed it over Tonya’s head.  She took a knife from the hands of one of the Inferno people, jammed the head on it, and handed it back.  The Transform had been dead before Carol beheaded it.

If Tonya hadn’t ducked, the corpse would have smacked her in the face.  “Stop this,” Tonya said, in her best take-control voice.  This was ridiculous behavior.

Tonya tuned her charisma to slow down a berserk Arm.  “Calm…” she said, or started to say.  Lori ran over to her, past Delia as if Delia was a statue, and put her bloody hand on Tonya’s chest.  A physical touch-based juice pattern came through: calmness, I’m your friend, this was an attack on Cathy and the Newt.  Tonya froze.

Lori was naked.

So was Carol.

Gore splashed Tonya’s nightgown as an invisible someone staggered by her and vomited – invisibly – in the hallway outside.  One of Carol’s many Crows.  She noticed her hands and feet were numb, approaching the sensation of nightmares where her hands felt like basketballs moving through mush. It would wake Tonya up instantly every time, only there would be no waking from this.  Tonya used her charisma to control her own desire to spew her evening snack.

“I killed her,” Lori said, hand still on Tonya’s chest.  “My call.”  Some of the blood was Lori’s, from a bullet wound in her upper thigh.  A trickle of blood still ran down Lori’s leg and now dripped on Tonya’s slipper.  Blood drenched Lady Death or no, Tonya had no reason to distrust Lori.  Behind Lori, Carol beheaded another dead Transform, and forced the head onto another Inferno knife.  The Arm was deep into her own darkness, her beast.

“Who?”  Which Focus died?  Tonya’s breath came in short bursts as she began to put together more of the details.  People crowded in behind Tonya; Gail and Polly and their bodyguards, Suzanne Morris and more of Carol’s people, serving as Morris’s bodyguards.  Carol, Lori and, if Tonya’s guess was correct about the vomiting Crow, Sky, had just thwarted something with the potential to fracture the Cause, a kidnapping and hostage situation.

“Maybelle and her bodyguards,” Lori said.  Huh?  Maybelle Roznovski was one of the witches Lori had secretly trained, one they had invited to be part of the Patterson attack group.  Polly had vetted her.  Tonya remembered the paperwork from last afternoon.  Tonya had met her many times.  Pleasant, not exceptional, not political in the slightest.  Her household specialty was photographic supplies and accessories, and they attempted to hawk decent but not exceptional black and white photos.  Her people weren’t going in on the attack because of their lack of military training.

“Impossible,” Tonya said.  “Patterson couldn’t have gotten to her.  What had Maybelle been thinking?”

Carol snarled again, moved over to a different Transform, and carved off another head.  Carol proved herself not totally berserk when she held up the Transform’s firearm – 9 mm with silencer – and showed it to Tonya and the rest of them.  Not one of the weapons they planned to use in the Pittsburgh attack or the clean up afterwards.  “Traitors die,” the Commander said.  This wasn’t a random attack.  This was an attempt to ‘rescue’ Cathy, a first Focus.

The three Inferno Transforms finally got up off Cathy.  Tonya recognized two of them: Ann Chiron and Steve Overshown.  Ann was wounded, a nasty bone-shattering wound to her right shoulder.  She had to be in tremendous pain.  After an Inferno kid holding the doorway between Carol and Elspeth’s suite tossed a first aid pack to Steve, he began to dress Ann’s wound.  Ann fought through the pain with Focus-like aplomb and carried one of the heads on the point of her knife.  Tonya couldn’t tell if her grimace came from the pain of her wound or the fact she was carrying a head on a knife.  Then Ann looked at Carol and nodded.  Carol gave her another head for her other hand, this time on the end of one of Carol’s own knives.

Once the Inferno guards moved off Cathy, an unknown Major Transform man tried to skitter away from the bed, but Cathy held on tight, and he stopped.  His face was bloody and puffy, the result of a punch or more likely a pistol butt to the head.  A Crow.  This had to be Newton.  For a moment, Tonya met his eyes, and saw ‘you twitch, I skunk you’ in them.  Tonya edged over to Shadow and Newton calmed.

From the hallway, Tonya heard Gail start to give orders about securing the area and organizing a cleanup crew.  Hardly upset at all.

Tonya opened her mouth to speak, and then stopped.  What was there to say?  ‘It was just a kidnapping – couldn’t you have just stopped them?  Subdued them?’  ‘You didn’t have to kill them all, did you?’ ‘They’re dead already, stop ripping them to ribbons, please?’  No one else appeared to be the least bit bothered by this bit of egregious and still – ewwww – ongoing Arm excess.  Not Polly, not even Gail.  Tonya turned to Shadow, who remained by her side.  He didn’t appear to be bothered, either.  He did maintain his disguise, though.

“The Commander protected a Crow from a traitorous Focus,” Shadow said.  “This is a good thing.”  Of all things, he took her hand in his and squeezed.  Tonya felt calmer just listening to Shadow.

Hell.

Carol appeared in front of Tonya, yet another head in her hands. Tonya moved her hand away as if it was a live electric wire.

“Do it,” Carol said, all blood-soaked demon predator.

“You’re crazy,” Tonya said.

Carol came closer, until she was just inches from Tonya.  “We make an example of traitors in my army.  And you follow orders, bitch, or you fucking take a walk.”

Yes, far too much rational thought here.  Carol was strengthening her dominance, and Tonya understood her motives and the kind of blood-soaked authority she wanted to establish.  Heads on spikes as a warning to people who defied her, iron control, Arm-harsh discipline.  People would follow her, too.  Even Tonya, her least reliable follower, would follow, now neatly trapped into a choice between obedience and exile.  She felt a cold shiver in her nerves at the vision of the coming darkness and slowly held up her hand to receive the dubious prize.

“Carol, no,” Polly said, stepping into Carol’s predatory path.  Carol turned on her with a snarl.  “There’s a better way.”

“What the fuck
better way
?”  Carol was angry, but not so angry, thank heavens, that she wouldn’t listen.

“We don’t want to distract people from the war,” Polly said, reasonable, logical, and at her most charismatically persuasive.  “We need people to be worrying about Patterson, not bloody internal fighting on our own side.  We need to play this down, not up.  Make this as minor an event as we can.”

Carol glared, but reason found its way through.  She nodded.  “For now.”  Expediency still ruled, thankfully, barely more appealing to Carol than the brutal dictatorship she wanted to establish.  Expediency wouldn’t always hold such valid trumps, or Polly’s unstoppable calming charisma backing them.  Tonya shivered to think what would happen then.

“This didn’t happen,” Polly said, her voice officer-firm.  “Not this way.  The official story is that we exposed Roznovski as a traitor and she and her people tried to fight their way out afterwards.”

They all fell into the Commander’s blood-soaked darkness.  No one even dared comment on Carol still holding a bloody head as it leaked gore down her naked arms.

“Tonya, Gail, Lori,” Polly said.  “Before we leave tomorrow, we need to re-examine the other witches, this time with multi-Focus charisma.  This was our fault.”

The Commander looked up, laughed, and flicked her knife to toss the bloody head into a corner.  It landed in a bloody puddle and spattered more dark red droplets against the wall.  “A bit late for that, now isn’t it?  Feel free to examine all you want, but you won’t find anyone else.  If Patterson had other plants, they would have struck at the same time.  Motherfucking traitor Focuses!”  She made a two handed fist and brought it down on the skull of one of Maybelle’s wounded and unconscious normals.  One that was still alive.  Gore flew.  “Traitors die!”

Tonya nodded and didn’t speak.  For the first time, she began to wonder if the cure for the first Focuses’ ills would turn out to be worse than the disease.

Carol Hancock:

“What do you mean, she won’t participate?” I said.  Tonya stepped back, intimidated.  I only asked a question; I wasn’t trying to intimidate.  Tonya needed to get used to her new self and my new self.  If I had a week, I would get Haggerty and put Tonya through some Focus training, Arm style.  She needed it.  Getting sexed up had cost Tonya what little remained of her edge.  She hadn’t even killed anyone in last night’s little fracas.

I didn’t have the fucking week necessary to fix Tonya.

I hoped I did the right thing by listening to Polly.  I needed to instill some serious and necessary discipline in my army, but every time I thought about it, I decided that Polly had been right.  There just wasn’t time.

Maybe after the battle, though.  I could see uses for a standing army, and I knew that a significant fraction of the people here would follow me if I asked them to join me.  In addition, it would be a hell of a lot easier to enforce my will with an army at my back.

We needed a little enforcement now.  We would need more afterwards, for when the Hunters struck.  The Hunters strength was at the squad level, which meant a guerilla war.  They would be hitting us everywhere, and only harsh discipline would keep our side from dissolving into anarchy.