The Forgefires of God (The Cause Book 3) (44 page)

I blinked, impossible with the world stopped around me.  I raised my hand, and currents of élan ran through it, physical to the touch.  Something an Arm could touch and sculpt.  “Noooo!”  Seductive, sexual foreplay of the juice variety.  Peace, utter peace.

Oh, how I wanted this.

“All the varieties of Transform there are or ever will be can be linked by the living élan.  One simple solution, in the deeper élan sea, and you can achieve all your goals at once.  The Focuses, Arms, Beasts, Crows and Transforms, all living in harmony, all working toward the same goals, surrounded by and guided by an élan beast of their own making.  I have achieved what you can only dream of.  You are years too late to stop me by killing me.”  The White Witch stood before me in all her glory and allure, projecting the truth of her words.

“Not real,” I said, feeling raw and earthbound and evil.

“Don’t lie to yourself, False Commander.”  Her voice was gentle and persuasive.  Patterson believed she had the true Commander in her service, a Focus by the name of Martine DeYoung, one of the co-leaders of the long-past Julius Rebellion.  DeYoung was supposedly a witch as natively talented as Polly or Patterson herself.  “Feel the
true way
!  The solution arises naturally within you, but without the élan sea, becomes corrupt.”

The beast.  Dammit, she was talking about
the beast!

“Everyone sees the true way differently,” Patterson said.  “Some see it as part of their religion, others as a tool, others as pure love, others as physical pleasure.  You see this as a weapon, for that’s what you are.”

I did.  In her élan sea, my beast would change, become an immense juice weapon I could wield, backed by my household’s immense élan beast.  No enemy could stand against me.  Following Patterson’s true way, a weapon of that magnitude would make me empress of the world!

I wanted this more than I wanted anything before in my life.  More than I had wanted juice when near withdrawal.  The
true way
was the answer.

In my memory, I heard Rumor’s voice, his Crow charisma echoing through my mind.  “Focus Rizzari calls it the household superorganism.  Here, it’s become corrupted and alive.  It thinks, using pieces of everyone’s mind.”  The élan beast, both Haggerty’s term and Patterson’s.

The
true way
required a group élan beast controlling my mind.  I had never liked the superorganism concept, and this just fucking proved why.  Temptation faded.  Rumor deserved a big lusty kiss for rolling me and putting the memory front and center in my head.

“Take it.  The
true way
is yours for the asking,” Patterson said.

Like hell I would.  I had no desire to hand over my will to some beastly group mind.  I sliced my knife through her illusion, focusing my beast through my predator.  Illusory gore spattered the time-frozen tableau.  Patterson’s sea green eyes, the sick eyes that came to everyone under her sway, spoke fire as she turned from seduction to anger.

“I condemn your soul to…”

“Arms aren’t so easily tricked,” I said over her words, Arm predator against Focus charisma.  The time illusion shattered, the Patterson illusion beside me vanished, and the world moved again.

Except for me.  My body remained frozen in place on the floor.

Only in my mind had I stood.

I twitched my left arm over to the back of my pants, and managed to twist my fingers around my fallback weapon, my .69 cal hand-cannon.  I attempted to turn it on Patterson, but when my aim approached her, my arm froze.

Bitch.

Polly, with her hands raised, stood a foot away from Patterson, standing between my legs.  Their eyes locked together and they ripped at each other’s juice structures with juice patterns.  Whetstone, horribly overmatched by this fight, took Dowling’s oversized sword from his body and threw it, spear-like, through the chest of the last of Patterson’s enslaved Focuses, the one directing Patterson’s defensive forces.  The white-blonde Focus, one of the more beautiful ones, shook her head and took the sword from her chest, the wound healing the instant the sword left her body.  From Tonya’s description, I knew this had to be Focus DeYoung.  As she gathered the juice to destroy Whetstone, I blew her head off with my fallback weapon.  So much for Patterson’s supposed Commander.  Her, I could shoot.

Sky and Rumor cast out the last of the Patterson-defending Crows from Crowdom, at least for the moment.  Autumn Maybray, physically the best of the Inferno Transforms, scaled a warehouse I-beam and drained an oversized magazine from her sub-gun at Patterson, or rather
near
Patterson, as unable to target her as I had been.

Polly’s death arced through the link, live lightning as bad as Bass’s worst torture chemical trick.  A split second later, Haggerty screamed in the distance, devastated.  I guess she had loved the bitch after all.  Given what I had seen, I couldn’t blame her.  White fire grew around Patterson, presaging some form of apotheosis and ruin to us all.

For less than a tenth of a second.

Tonya and Keaton, together, whipped two hundred pounds of chain through Patterson, beheading her.  Their dead bodies landed together, juice exhausted, behind Patterson.

I experienced Patterson’s will upon me again, as she ordered me to heal her, put her body back together, pick up her head that had landed beside my left arm and put it back on her body.  Beheading her hadn’t been enough.

Patterson’s order broke the rest of my paralysis, allowing me to stand and grab her head.  For a moment, I toyed with the idea of putting her head back on her body.  Backwards.  No.  Too easy.  I wanted payback.  I wanted her
death
.  A slight smile crept over my face.

“I’ve always wanted to juice suck a Focus,” I said.  Then I did so, and as I did, she died, at last slain by the Commander she had both feared and created.

There was no pleasure in the drain.  She really was a Monster.  I dropped her empty head, turned and vomited.

Dammit, This Was Too Many Crows!
December 25, 1972

Catherine (Cathy) Elspeth – Focus #18 – February 1958.  Focus Elspeth transformed at a relatively young age (eighteen) and because of this has always maintained a different viewpoint on society and the interaction of Transforms with society than the other first Focuses.  It was her lobbying that moved the UFA to sponsor a Transform rights movement in 1964 – which she has headed since that time.  In 1965, after the shakeup in the UFA caused by Focus Julius, Focus Elspeth became a member of the UFA Council, and is currently the only first Focus on the UFA Council.

“Lives of the Focuses”

Henry Zielinski:

“Go, go, go!  Police!”  Sirens, shouting, the odor of blood and explosives.  Zielinski’s head rang with them all.

He had wrenched his knee when Cindy Lederer landed on him, after Patterson bowled everyone over with a corrupted juice pattern from the inside of the warehouse.  He could barely walk.  Armenigar picked him up and stuck him on her shoulder, along with four other people.  Soon, a sixth, Cindy herself.  Armenigar kept walking and muttering to herself.  Her words sounded like obscenities, but he couldn’t tell for sure.

“Ohhhh,” Cindy said from on top of him.  “I ever tell you I hate fights?”

Zielinski nodded.  His head was one of the few parts of his body he could move, the rest of his body squished among the other people on Armenigar’s broad shoulders.  He couldn’t tell where Armenigar took them, able to see only the rubble-strewn ground beneath him.  Armenigar stank of blood and bad juice.  “Often.”

“Nothing here changes my mind,” she said.

“What’s going, ugh, on,” Zielinski said, as Armenigar stepped in a hole and most of Cindy’s weight landed on his belly.

“The last volleys of the defenders practically annihilated us, after Patterson’s last attack,” Cindy said.  “So many killed and wounded.  The Commander’s getting the last of us out.  There’s three more who fell and can’t make it on their own.  She’s off retrieving them.”

“The trucks are ready?”

“Yes.”

“Not for you, big boy,” Armenigar said, to Zielinski.  “You get the ambulance.”

“I’m easy to convince.”

“The ambulance,” Cindy said.  “Why?”

“For Transforms, so Focuses can support their self-healing,” Hank said.

“You’re a Transform?” Cindy said.  “Nah.”

“What?  You can’t sense me?”

“Sure, as a human.  Of course,” Cindy said, “I’ve never been able to sense Transforms as anything but human.  I’m an Arm slash Crow Sport, remember?  My goddamned metasense is tuned to plants.  Well, plants and nervous systems, but only if I push it.”

Right.  “Hey, careful with me,” Cindy said.  “Broken bones or something.”

“You get the ambulance as well.  Torn knee ligaments and no skill at pain maintenance or self-healing.”  Armenigar paused.  “Such a waste.  Didn’t I tell you to spend more time training?”

“Yes, yes, Joan, just be careful with my poor aching body.”

“Joan?” Zielinski said, as Armenigar lowered him to the ground next to the ambulance.  There was a puddle in the pavement right under his hip, and cold water soaked immediately up to his skin.  Several spent shells poked his shoulder, so he twisted around to get them out of the way, and failed.

“Yes,” Armenigar said, with a sigh.  “Joan.  Not the sort of name that inspires predatory terror, now is it?”

Ah.  Psychological side effects.  The reason for Armenigar’s mediocre predator effect.

Armenigar went off to tend to the other wounded, and Zielinski tried again to get those spent shells out from under his shoulder.  They sat in the awkward place where his hand couldn’t quite reach.  After a moment, he sat up, attempting to ignore the stab of agony from his knee.  He didn’t recognize his new location, but did recognize the driver of the ambulance, one of Focus Hargrove’s people.  Someone picked him up from behind, likely an Arm by the strength and the size of the hands carrying him.  A Noble would have been bigger, and no one else would have been as strong.

She ran him into the ambulance and laid him on a stretcher, and he finally recognized her.  Carol.  She was battered and bloody with bullet and shrapnel wounds, but she remained functional.  Zielinski felt a knot of worry inside of him unwind.

“Guess what,” he said.  Carol drew back and frowned.

“Shit no Hank, you transformed!”  She picked him up again and held him at arm’s length in the cramped ambulance.  Studying him.

“Hey, it’s not the end of the world.”

“I’m supposed to be protecting you, remember?  What the fuck are you doing here, anyway!  You’re supposed to be in Chicago, keeping your head down.”

“We knew this was going to happen, someday.”

“Right.  Lori tagged you, good.  I’m not sure you fit there, long term.  You never got along well with the Inferno household.  I think you’ll like Cathy Elspeth’s people.  More mature, studious, and literate.”

“You’re taking Elspeth?”

“Of course,” Carol said.  “I’ve been helping her heal, and she’s mine, now.  Chicago?”

“Your three Arms came by and said they wanted me as a battlefield medic, and to birddog Billington and Bartlett.  They thought I would be safer in the fight than back in Chicago, with Bass loose and with Gilgamesh otherwise occupied.  I couldn’t refuse them.”

“Well, you should have.  Look where it’s got you.”

Hank nodded, trying to quiet his spinning thoughts.  “I’m a male Transform, right, nothing strange?”

Carol examined him.

“Nothing strange.  An absolutely standard issue male Transform.”

“Good.”

Lori and Sky walked over to the open rear of the ambulance, a fallen student Arm, Sokolnik, balanced limply between them.  Sokolnik was raving, each sentence spoken in a different voice.  “Found her,” Lori said.

Carol dropped from the ambulance to the ground, took Sokolnik’s chin in her hand and raised the young Arm’s gaze to meet hers.  “Enough of that!  The fight’s over and you’re not in Patterson’s cesspool anymore.  The rest of you, get the fuck back into those quiet pools where you belong!”

Sokolnik jolted to her feet, as if hit by a strong electrical shock.  The humanity left her face and her posture, leaving little more than a robotic expressionless shell behind.

“I’m back,” she said, in an affectless voice.  “Thank you, Commander.”

“Get to work,” Carol said, after a short examination of the young Arm.  “Here’s the list.”

“Yes, ma’am.”  The young Arm glanced at the list, nodded, and marched off.  Hank shook his head – young Arm Sokolnik was the strangest Major Transform he had ever encountered.

Carol turned to face Hank, who had taken the opportunity to sit down on the stretcher.  “Hank, I changed my mind.  I’m not going to do what I was thinking of doing to Adkins, which was to put her into Monsterhood for as long as I was in withdrawal.  I’m going to give her to the Focuses, with the rest of my captive firsts.  I saw one honest-to-goodness Focus Monster – Patterson – and I never want to see another one again.”

“She was an honest-to-god Monster?”

“Absolutely.  You should have seen what her body looked like once she died and her illusions failed.  It was bad enough to get an entire room full of Transforms puking all over the place once they saw it.”

“Save her body,” Hank said.  “I’ve got…”

Carol just shook her head.  “Hey, I need to leave.  I’d love to take you with me, but I think it best you stay here, for now.  Besides,
you’re not done transforming
.”  Oh, crap.  Her comment meant side effects, and trouble.

Carol left.  Annoying.  He would likely never see even a piece of Patterson’s body.

“What’s she in such a big hurry for?” Cindy said, from the stretcher next to him.  He couldn’t remember how she got there.

“If I can hazard a guess, she’s off to present Patterson’s captive Crows to the Crows attending the Crow duel.  The Transform ambulance isn’t going there, unfortunately.”

“Too bad,” Cindy said.  “Seeing Crows duel sounds fun.  I ever tell you how much I hate fights?”

Tonya Biggioni:

Cold.

Well, I’ve been dead before, Tonya thought.  I just don’t remember being cold
and
dead before.

She sat up, one of those out of body things.

There she was, laid out on a slab in the refrigerator truck.  The rolling morgue, the one reserved for Major Transforms.  Loaded, too.  Too bad.  She had been shown the truck, as a witch, with the idea that if she survived the attack on Patterson, she would be able to help there, feeding juice to Transforms to help them heal, to see if they could be brought back from the nearly dead.

Keaton lay next to her on the slab, their hands frozen together.  How sweet!  In life as in death.  She had always told her Tonya would be the death of the Arm.  It appeared as though Stacy had been right.

Tonya glanced around the refrigerator truck.  At the far end, Death was doing its thing.  The black cloak, the hidden face…but wasn’t Death supposed to carry a scythe, not a clipboard?  Ah, this was Lady Death.  Women always did things differently.

Tonya turned the other way.  There was Polly, laid out flat like Tonya.  This was going to hurt.  Polly was the one who always survived these things without a scrape.  Tonya had never found the time to properly make up with her old friend.  Patterson came between them, and just as Polly feared, Tonya had been too weak to keep Shirley out of her mind.  Major Transforms had personality types, and like attracted like.  Shirley, and herself, and Stacy, and even Gail, belonged to the same persona group or something.  Neither Polly nor Carol did.  Nor Lori.

Behind Polly was another Transform, this one alive and walking.  Sky, it had to be, checking on one of the Nobles, Dowling.  Her one-night lover wasn’t dead, just resting, the bowling ball sized hole in his chest notwithstanding.

“Hey, Sky, what’s going on?”

No answer.

“Am I dead?  I must be…”  Tonya let her voice trail off, in sadness.

“SKKKKYYYYYY!”  Lori’s voice rattled the walls of the refrigerator truck, and Sky turned around, sheepishly.  “Quit yanking Tonya’s chain and give her a hand, why don’t you?”

Sky looked at Dowling’s arm, and hand, and then at the knife Sky carried at his waist.  He sighed, and shook his head.  “Sorry, darling, but my repressed panic keeps wanting to turn into comic japery.”  Sky walked over, and opened Tonya’s eyes.

Boop.

Tonya looked up from her body on the cold slab.

“I was talking?” Tonya said.

“Yes, and wiggling, as well.  Lori said you had a good chance of recovering, if she fed you some juice.”

That was strange.

Stacy sat up, slowly, beside her, and Sky helped Tonya sit up, as well.

“I know we created a funny tag together, Tonya, but this is ridiculous,” Stacy said, holding up their frozen-together hands.

Lori walked back, and Tonya smelled the blood and gun smoke on Lori’s cloak.  Lori radiated unease and mental illness, something stressed and broken, but Tonya wasn’t sure what.  Lori wasn’t particularly wounded.  “I think you’re going to need to get that thing dry-cleaned,” Tonya said.

“Dry cleaned and put on display,” Lori said, holding the cloak between her and Tonya, looking through the bullet holes.  “Sky, do the damned Crow trick and warm up their bodies, please?”

“Oh, right.  I guess frigid’s not even appropriate for Tonya, any more.  It never was for Kali.”

“Skkyyyyy” the three women said.

“Sorry.  I should get locked away somewhere when I let myself get this stressed.  I thought the morguemobile would be safe, though the audience is rather stiff, and…”  Lori’s hand covered Sky’s mouth, reducing his voice to a mumble.  Eventually, Sky stopped talking.

“Why don’t you be a nice Crow and go find out what in the hell’s wrong with Sir Munch.  I can’t for the life of me figure out why he hasn’t snapped out of it.”

Without thinking, Tonya made the juice flow, her normal half-subconscious juice-balancing she had been doing for fourteen plus years.

“Um, Tonya?” Stacy said.

“What.”

“How did you just give me juice?”

Tonya turned to Stacy.  “I did, didn’t I.”

“Yes,” Lori said.  “That was real strange.”  Tonya blamed the tag they accidentally created in the fight, which didn’t metasense like anything Tonya had ever metasensed before.  The strange mutual tag hadn’t gone away, either.  Hell, if her metasense analysis was correct, the tags couldn’t
ever
go away.

Stacy lifted her hand, frowned at the missing fingers, and flexed.  “If you don’t mind, could you find me a warm place to curl up for a long healing sleep,” Keaton said.  “I’ve got big holes in my body and bigger holes in my mind.  And keep the goddamned Crow away from me, will yah?”  Lori helped the Arm to her feet, and led her to the front of the refrigerator truck, where they had set up a smaller area, not refrigerated, for the recovered to, well, recover some more.  Lori bundled Stacy under plenty of blankets and walked back.  Tonya wondered if she needed to go and comfort the Arm, and decided to let Keaton cry herself out, first.