The enemy action made the decision easy. “No killing. Just disable,” Gilgamesh said, signaling for them to run forward. The Viscount stayed with them, actually steadying Nameless and Coriolis and helping them keep up.
As they ran, two members of the enemy watcher team ran forward to the Ackerman household, took the hostage from the inside team, and retreated. The inside people stayed inside, presumably to continue their heavy-handed negotiations. Gilgamesh followed as best he could with his metasense, relying on Sky’s commentary for real understanding.
The Scar Focus had to know she was up against Crows, sending a team of normals to kidnap a normal as part of their negotiating strategy. Only Sky could have picked this out, and from what Sky had said, he was rarely out on any standard patrols, save for the ones around Inferno.
“Friend Noble, may I ask if Focus Ackerman has ever heard your Terror roar?” Gilgamesh said, as they drew within sight of the cluster of rowhouses that constituted Focus Ackermann’s household.
“You talk funny, but the answer is ‘yes’,” Viscount Sellers said. He blinked, and then smiled. “Oh? May I?”
“Charge and scatter? Yes. That would be wonderful,” Gilgamesh said. Just don’t scatter any of them this way.
The Viscount took off at a sprint, followed by a wildly bounding Sky. Gilgamesh slowed to a walk and turned to Coriolis and Nameless, who now looked properly spooked and panicky. And exhausted. “There’s good cover over here,” he said, pointing back toward the main street, to a back alley to the side of the Jeremiah and Villone sporting goods store. Coriolis and Nameless managed to summon sufficient energy for another jog, motivated by the lure of a hiding place, and the three of them waited behind the dumpster, metasensing the fight. The fight didn’t turn out to be much of an actual fight, as Seller’s Terror barks and Sky’s dross constructs scattered the enemy with ease. Sky swooped down to ground level, corralled a very short person (likely the kidnap victim), asked the Viscount to do something (picking up the enemy team’s fallen weapons, likely fallen because of Sky’s dross constructs), then approached Focus Ackerman’s place.
Sky returned a half hour later, accompanied by the Viscount. The Viscount carried a heavy bag filled with weapons and ammunition. He dumped it on the ground in the alley, where it thudded heavily. The three Crows crept out from behind the dumpster to stare at the impressive collection of armaments.
“Well. I think I talked Flo out of bolting the rebellion, but I’m not sure,” Sky said. “Of all things, to get Scar’s minions out of Flo’s household in a peaceful manner, I had to agree not to tell any Focuses or household Transforms about this little deal gone bad. Or they’ll take it personal-like, moving on from kidnapping to violence.”
“They forgot to forbid you to write about it in your letters, didn’t they?” Gilgamesh said.
Sky nodded, giving Gilgamesh a cat-eating-the-canary grin. He turned to Nameless, whose black skin made him almost invisible in the darkness, even to a Crow’s eyes. “You saw this coming, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” Nameless said. “I’m not one to be able to solve problems the way you adventurers do, or keep them from occurring, but I have found that if I attract the right companions, good things often happen.”
“Uh huh,” Viscount Sellers said. “I guess this strange talk you Crows do is what you mean when you say you’re mystical.” A term often applied to Nameless. “Are you a mystical Crow too then, Gilgamesh?”
That accusation panicked Gilgamesh enough to back off a step. “No sir, not me, not mystical at all. I’m an engineer.”
Nevertheless, if he wasn’t mystical, then why did he have a bad feeling the Rizzari rebellion was in bad shape? Kali’s training, then. The question on his always-paranoid mind was: how many of these normal-led negotiation teams had already gotten to the rebel Focuses?
Gail Rickenbach: September 4, 1968
Gail had been daydreaming over the last few days about what it would be like to have another Focus as a friend. Someone who understood all of her problems. The loneliness never hurt like this before, until she knew she might not be alone. If Beth Hargrove disapproved of her too, she didn’t know how she would cope. She wished her live-in boyfriend Van Schuber was here for support, but he was off butting heads with his fussy PhD dissertation advisor and probably needed as much support as she did.
Maturity and responsibility, she mused, wasn’t half as wonderful as she once had anticipated.
She had already showered and dressed in one of Vera Bracken’s better suits, two whole hours before the meeting. Gail stared at her reflection in the mirror and tugged futilely at the jacket. The jacket didn’t fit her and made her look awkward. Her body shape had changed since her transformation, with more bust, more ass and embarrassingly less belly. None of her own good clothes fit her any better than this and none of them hung as well as Vera’s Executive Secretary suit, anyway.
She checked her face in the mirror, but her face still glowed. No zits, no blemishes. She hadn’t tried to put on make-up. She wasn’t any good at make-up, and besides, her face didn’t look too bad on its own. Not anymore.
Something was definitely wrong with her hair, though.
“Gail?” Trisha said, tentatively, from the door. The tentative voice was normal for Trisha these days. She had been a lot more subdued since her damned boyfriend had run off with the household’s money.
Gail approved of the change.
“There’s something wrong with my hair,” Gail said, tugging at a lock in frustration.
Trisha came into the room, looking still rumpled and sleep-fogged, followed by Betha Ebener trailing after. Betha, an older Transform, and her husband owned the small farm where Gail’s household lived.
“Can I?” Trisha said, wary of Gail.
“Yes, please. Tell me what’s wrong,” Gail said, as she checked Trisha’s juice count and fixed it. She automatically checked these days, because she was still mad at Trisha over her thief boyfriend. She constantly fought the urge to stick Tricia into peri-withdrawal until she begged for mercy.
“Your hair looks fine to me,” Betha said.
Trisha came close and held Gail’s hair up, while Betha puttered around beside her.
“Your hair changes,” Trisha said. “Right out to about six inches from your head, it’s gorgeous, rich and full, with little bits of red and gold highlighting the brown. Sort of exotic. After six inches, it’s normal hair again. Limp, dull brown, ordinary hair. Put your hands in your hair. You can feel the difference.” Trisha lost her tentativeness completely when she started working with Gail’s hair.
Gail put her hand to her head and ran her fingers through her hair. The new hair was softer and thicker. Probably another crazy change caused by her being a Focus. She had an entire page of her research group’s scribble board covered with such changes.
“Can you do something about it?”
Trisha positioned Gail back in front of the mirror again and started arranging her hair. She took a section of hair from the top of Gail’s head and laid it along the back.
“The old hair ruins the effect of the new hair.” Trisha paused and Gail metasensed her worry. “I’m sorry.”
There was an obvious solution to that. “Cut it off,” Gail said.
“Are you sure?” Betha said, panicky and horrified. Trisha echoed her, but without the panic and horror.
“Yes. Cut it off. Get rid of the old hair,” Gail said. Whatever anyone else might think, she was a Focus. The least she could do was get rid of her damned old normal hair.
Gail’s head felt light every time she moved. It was odd to be without the extra weight of all her hair. She had worn her hair long since she was a child.
It was as some writer said, about waiting for a hanging clarifying thought. For once, her mind was clear, alive, and taut. Trisha wasn’t doing so well. Not a new story in her household, which had an epidemic of ‘not doing well’. Trisha still had a job, one of the few, but the other hairdressers at her shop
knew she was a Transform. The management didn’t fire her, because Trisha had a loyal clientele. No one told the customers, but they could still make life miserable for her.
Gail studied Kurt’s brown head as he drove, and remembered how she hadn’t been entirely honest with Focus Biggioni. She had a little secret, a secret likely to make the Focuses reject her yet again, if they ever found out. Before her confrontation with Bart, her house president, she had found out Kurt was dealing drugs. Taking the profits and donating them to the house. His actions made Gail want to cry because of the risks he took as a normal for the wellbeing of a Transform household. Gail had approved his actions. She suspected she had lost Kurt’s friendship forever, but, in the process, the household had gained a selfless friend.
Secrets, though. Those weighed mightily.
“Gail?” Kurt said, from the front, where he was driving. “According to the address, the place should be nearby, but I can’t find anything that looks like a Focus Household.”
Gail read the paper Kurt handed back, and Buddy Attendale craned to look over her shoulder. Gail got a nose full of unwashed male body and winced. Buddy worked afternoons and evenings down at the Red Wrench Auto Parts store, so he was almost always the one tapped for morning bodyguard duty. Gail was getting tired of him and his smell. He showered before he went to work, but not earlier, and the odor could get real ripe. How he stayed a married man was beyond her.
Gail reached her arm over the seat and pointed. “What about that little driveway? I think I spotted something back there.”
“It’s just a driveway going back to the loading docks,” Kurt said. But he ignored his own protest, put the car into gear again and followed the driveway anyway.
“This is the place!” Gail said, before they had gone more than twenty feet. She metasensed the presence of Transforms ahead of them.
‘The place’ was another warehouse, just like the others, except set farther back from the road and accessible only by the narrow pothole filled driveway. The place was run down and depressing, surrounded by pavement, with no plants in sight save for a few weeds poking up through the parking lot. Except for several men unloading furniture from a U-Haul truck, Gail picked up few signs of any other people.
Kurt shrugged and parked the car next to two others along the wall of the warehouse.
“Hello?” Gail said.
One of the Transform men stopped as he climbed into the truck to pull out more furniture. “You want something?” he said. His voice wasn’t particularly unfriendly, but it wasn’t welcoming either.
“I’m – um – Gail Rickenbach,” she said. She had been about to announce herself as a Focus, but at the last moment, her nerve failed her. The Focus title seemed so pretentious. “Beth Hargrove invited me here.” Her comment came out as more of a question than a statement.
The man’s expression changed immediately, the cold distance gone. “Oh, Focus Rickenbach. Beth’s been expecting you. Come in. Come in.” He jumped down from the truck and showed her towards the open door.
Up above, before Gail got to the building, a young woman poked her head out of a second story window. She was a cute kid, with bright red hair and freckles, and didn’t appear to be older than nineteen. She looked like something off a Peter Maxx poster or concert handbill, the ones where they did up the women supernatural like, with little shiny stars in their hair.
“Gail,” she said. “I’m up here. Come on up.”
Oh. The cute kid must be Beth Hargrove, and she couldn’t possibly be nineteen. Gosh.
“I’m coming,” Gail said. She smiled and waved, but her smile and wave weren’t as warm as she intended, because her stomach chose that moment to do flip-flops from nerves. Like Focus Adkins, Beth was nearly impossible to metasense unless Gail concentrated. Then whoosh! there Beth was, glowing like a small sun.
Gail and her crew entered the warehouse, a large open space with a few narrow windows. Moving boxes and furniture lined the walls. Whatever organization was going to occur clearly hadn’t started. Nobody lived here yet.
“Oh, you cut your hair!” Beth said, as she came down the stairs at the other side of the warehouse. “Good for you. It took me almost a year to get up the gumption and I looked like an idiot the entire time. Sorry for the mess,” she said, waving her hands about as if she was about to fly. “We’re moving in here in two weeks, so this is disaster time, but my old house is pretty clogged up with bad juice and I thought you might like this place better.”
Gail thought about her time in the Detroit Transform Clinic and the misery she suffered there, and nodded.
“This is fine,” she said. “Thanks.”
Beth Hargrove did indeed appear to be a cute nineteen. She was of medium height, an inch shorter than Gail, with an athletic build, and covered with freckles from head to foot. She wasn’t at all dressed for today’s early Fall weather, in her tank top and shorts. One glance at Beth and you thought ‘summer’ and ‘beach’. Her hair was bright red and wavy, waist length, with twinkles as if it had stars in it. She had an infectious smile. Gail relaxed, Beth being nothing like prissy Focus Asshole Adkins or archly proper Focus Big-Boss Biggioni.
“Come on,” Beth said, indicating a stairway. “We can get a little privacy up top.” She leaned to the side and called out, “Hey, Phil!”
A young man carrying a large box poked his head in the door. “Yes, ma’am?” he said, cheerfully.
“I think Evie packed some food in the cooler. Can you bring most of it upstairs for us?”
“Sure. No problem. Just let me get rid of this box.”
Beth smiled and led the way upstairs. Gail followed, with Kurt and Buddy tagging behind. Following them was the man who greeted them initially. Beth stopped halfway up the stairs and turned back.
“You two might like to stay down here, and visit,” she said to Kurt and Buddy. “I’ll bet you haven’t had much chance to talk to people who are members of other households.”
Kurt nodded, but Buddy missed the hint.
“Huh-uh,” he said, and shook his head. The man following frowned and Gail noticed Phil put his box down and move closer. “I’m staying…” Buddy said, but Beth cut him off.
“Your Focus and I will be having a private conversation,” Beth said, all the friendly warmth gone out of her voice. She smiled, but this smile was a cold thing and didn’t touch her eyes. Gail turned red and wished Buddy would, for once, decide not to be a royal pain in the ass.
This time, at least, Buddy seemed to find Beth more than he was ready to tangle with.
“Ah,” he said, backing down. “I guess I could stay down here.”
“Good, good,” Beth said, the warmth back in her voice. “Phil, Bob, take care of our friends here. Make them feel welcome.”
Wow! What Beth did had to be real Focus charisma. Gail had never seen Focus charisma at work before, and she practically panted in desire. Taking the side of her people never entered her mind.
“Sure,” they said. Buddy and Kurt went back down the stairs as Gail followed Beth up the stairs.
The second floor was much like the first, with more windows and an open ceiling where the rafters showed. Boxes and clutter spread everywhere, except for the far end, partitioned off by blankets draped over a clothesline.
“I’m sorry about that,” Beth said, when they got to the top. “I shouldn’t have stepped in over your bodyguards, but they didn’t appear to be used to taking orders yet, and I really did want to be able to talk to you…”
Beth hadn’t metasensed a nail sticking up from a two-by-four under a thin layer of spread out newspapers, and stepped toward it. Gail grabbed Beth and gently yanked her so she wouldn’t get her foot poked. “Sorry. You must have missed the nail.”
“Huh?” Beth said, stopping and giving Gail her hard look. She then turned and kicked the newspaper off the board, revealing the nail. She stopped, turned to glance at Gail again, slowly, and shook her head.
“Sorry if I startled you,” Gail sai
d. “Sorry about Buddy, too. He shouldn’t have behaved like that.”
“If you’d be more comfortable with them up here, just say so,” Beth said, uneasy. “I know it can be a little unnerving to be somewhere strange without your backup. Should I go ask them to come back?”
Gail most emphatically did not feel more comfortable with her bodyguards. She hated having them lurking over her like jailors.
“No, no problem,” she said. She took a deep breath and smiled a little bit. “Thank you, actually. It’ll be much easier to talk if they’re downstairs.”
Beth nodded. “Yeah, I thought so.” She led Gail over to the curtained-off section at the far end of the warehouse, back toward the way they had entered the building. Beth must have been up here when she stuck her head out the window.
“Really,” Beth said, as they wound their way between the boxes and furniture, “you shouldn’t have to worry about your security while you’re here. Bob is a respectably decent bodyguard and most of the rest of the men here have had at least some training. We’re pretty well protected.”
Gail remembered the hard stare Bob had given her when they first arrived, and decided she believed Beth. Bob didn’t look like much got past him.
“Training?”
Beth nodded. “Yeah. There’s a lot more to bodyguarding than standing around and looking muscular. Hey, I apologize for the mess. We’re not moving for another two weeks, but the old place is so bad I take every chance I can to be over here. I set up a little area so I can even do some work here, during the day when most of my people are out of the house anyway.”
“No, it’s fine,” Gail said, wishing she wouldn’t apologize so much. She had the urge to start apologizing for her many apologies. Nearly as many as Beth’s…
They came to an opening between a couple of sheets and passed through into the enclosed area. The area was about eight feet deep at the end of the warehouse. In the small area sat a student desk and a couple of wooden chairs. Over to the right was a table, and to the left, the usual collection of boxes and furniture. Beth led them toward the chairs.
In this Night We Own (The Commander Book 6) Page 9
