In this Night We Own (The Commander Book 6)

by Randall Farmer

  This wouldn’t work unless I did something I had hoped to avoid. “Delia, I can heal you, but since you’re a Transform, I need to tag you first.” I didn’t know I would need to tag her until I contemplated the healing, but my instincts knew.

  The recent memory of the spurting blood filled Delia’s mind. “Whatever it takes.”

  Not an attitude I wanted to see in an ordinary Transform, but I could work with it. “Say ‘I’m yours’.”

  “I’m yours.”

  “You’re mine.” The juice moved. I caught her eyes and went predator. “You will forget the pain,” I said.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  I cut with my already bloody knife, extracting the bullet. Delia screamed. Infection? Pshaw! My healing tongue would prevent any infections. I licked, keeping a low burn going, my mind visualizing the anatomy involved in the healing operation. The healing didn’t take long to complete, the worst being the cephalic vein, which the bullet had ruptured.

  “This is amazing,” Geraldine said, after I finished. “I had no idea anyone could do that, ma’am, much less an Arm.”

  “Glad to be of service,” I said, wiping blood from my mouth and face with one of the few clean patches of my shirt. I was a disgusting mess, covered with my blood, Delia’s blood, chimp lady blood, and God knew what else. I had a long commentary prepared about balancing karma with my actions, but Sky tossed in one of his nastier verbal bombs before I said my piece.

  “With the Commander, the amazing is to be expected,” Sky said.

  Innocuous, right? Never, from Sky.

  Geraldine went white, goose pimply and sweaty palmed. To my shock, she already knew about ‘the Commander’. To her, ‘the Commander’ was something out of myths and prophesies, like King Arthur, or heaven forbid Jesus Christ – as well as something related to events from before either of our transformations. As if someone unworthy had claimed the title and it hadn’t gone well.

  “Only a few Crows call me the Commander,” I said. Worried. I wanted to thrash Sky, but that wasn’t going to happen, ever. I gave Geraldine a studied look and realized that to get anything at all out of her on this subject, I would have to abuse my hospitality. Thelma, on the other hand, didn’t have a clue, which led me to believe this was an East Region Focus thing. Dammit! “I don’t call myself that, but out of politeness I haven’t bitten the heads off of those Crows who use the term.”

  Geraldine’s worried unquiet grew worse. She now believed I was likely the legitimate Commander, based on my comment. Crap. I hated anything that even mildly smacked of the supernatural these days; my ‘magical thinking’ phase had not been a good time.

  The only ray of sunshine in this mess was Geraldine’s horror that she might have ended up on the wrong side. To whatever crap legend she believed, the Commander was the ultimate good guy, at least in the military-leader-style-of-good-guy sense of the word. The corpses I would tread on were supposed to be the enemies of the Focus community.

  We rode the bus back to Indianapolis, each locked in our own thoughts. Sky recovered enough after an hour of sleep to crawl over to Gilgamesh and get my Crow partner back on his feet before we got back to our commandeered motel. We got the pictures rush developed and sent copies of them and copies of the negatives off with Geraldine and Delia, who flew back to Philadelphia. Thelma and her guards, with their own copies of the pictures and a set for Focus Fingleman, flew back to Houston.

  I drove back with the Crows. I had a Keaton presentation to give, and as always I needed their help.

  Enkidu: November 16, 1968 – November 21, 1968

  “Enkidu.”

  He ignored the voice in his mind.

  “Enkidu!”

  He recognized something familiar in both the voice and the name. The hungry dark called, though, and he ignored both the voice and the familiarity.

  “Enkidu! You fucking ignorant fucked up piece of shit! You fucked up to beat all fuck ups, you’re fucking up now, and if you don’t quit fucking up you’re going to be a dead fuck up!”

  Ah, that’s what the hungry dark was. Death. The darkness was calm and painless, but he knew it for an enemy. He attempted to resist the call, and in exchange bought himself stupefying pain.

  “Much better. Keep resisting and we might even live through this. No thanks to you and your fuck-ups.”

  We?

  “Yes, we. You think anybody else gives a shit whether you die?”

  We?

  The voice rumbled an exaggerated canine sigh. “Come on, asshole. Get your mind engaged. You’re going to need it all to get through this one.”

  He remembered. He had tried to talk to Odin about their Master, after their Master had publically rebuked Enkidu for his necessary rampage in Detroit. He had hoped to enlist help, but Odin had greeted his first hints that their Master was a Crow as treason of the highest order. Enkidu had discovered the hard way that he couldn’t beat Odin in a fight.

  Odin had killed him.

  “I told you, you were fucking stupid. You fucked up.”

  Yes. Death. Death happened to Chimeras who got stupid. Maybe somebody would find his head and grow a new Chimera. But wasn’t his mind supposed to be gone by now?

  “Well, yes, but we’re not exactly going to play by the rules, now are we?”

  Under the circumstances, he wasn’t going to argue.

  “Good. Let’s start with the basics. What’s your name?”

  Who are you? Why are you helping me?

  Another canine sigh. “You figure it out.”

  Thinking. Hard work right now. He did possess enough juice, though, to metasense that he lay in in a pool of élan. Ah, the results of the élan explosion from his death.

  He looked. In the haze of élan surrounding him, he saw the pale figure of a ghost. Four legs. Wolf. Piebald, brown and white. It smelled of storms.

  His own ghost.

  Well, this was unusual.

  “Good. Now let’s get to work. We don’t have much time before your mind escapes. It’s a damned good thing Odin left you where you fell, so we have all this élan to work with. Now, again, what’s your name?”

  His name. It was a hard question. He would have to think in order to answer. Enkidu. My name is Enkidu.

  “Good start. Now tell me about your transformation.”

  Another hard question. I woke up from my transformation in 1966. December of 1966. Gilgamesh was there…

  A scream interrupted his endless recitation of his memories, feelings, opinions, morals, priorities and everything else that made him Enkidu, more than a simple head restarting his Chimera life.

  A female scream. Then, “Cleo, I found him! He’s over here!”

  He looked over at the voice and remembered the Gal’s name. Heidi. She looked human, save for a set of cat eyes and ears. The Enkidu ghost bowed to her, and faded away, Cheshire Cat style. The other two ghosts, an implacable Torma and a frowning and unhappy Grendel, faded as well. They had appeared only after the Enkidu ghost had told him about their lives and deaths. Neither of the other two ghosts had ever spoken.

  ---

  The Gals had supplied him with a prodigious quantity of food and élan, and after a week he had a real body again. He was even almost mobile. Today he had walked several steps without help.

  Every day, Cleo grew more impatient with his lack of answers.

  “I’m getting tired of this, Enkidu,” Cleo said.

  “Tired of what?” Enkidu said. He was tired of the damned bed. Hunters didn’t belong in beds.

  “What happened to you? How did you survive?”

  He turned his head away and Cleo frowned. “You almost died. I’m actually shocked you didn’t die. You know how little was left of you when we found you? Come on, lover. I want to help you.” She smiled her toothy smile and held him close. His almost death had rattled her badly.

  “Who else knows about what happened?”

  She shook her head. “Nobody. If somebody wants you dead, the last thing they need to
learn is that you’re alive and vulnerable. We put work into lying low.”

  Smart woman. He owed her, he always owed her, but this time he didn’t have anything to give her. “I don’t know how I survived.” He had thought about the ghosts for days now, wondering where they came from. The Enkidu ghost had smelled of the storm, the wind, the messages he heard in the thunder and learned from the dawn clouds. He had always been better at reading the weather than any of the other Hunters. He now suspected weather reading was only a minor use of this particular ability.

  Cleo sighed. “Okay. But…who the fuck killed you? What happened?” She snuggled next to him, and the warmth of her leathery hide against his side was comforting.

  “I can’t talk about it.”

  “Right. So you don’t talk and pretend you’re recovering slower than you really are.” Cleo arched her back, and wiggled her half-Monster form seductively at him. She shook her head, and a sinuous tremor snaked down the length of her torso, waving the line of downy tufts that started on her head and went down to the small of her back. Normally, he couldn’t resist her when she did that. She gave him an open-mouthed grin, showing her Monsterish pointy teeth. “I want to know, anyway.”

  Enkidu sighed. “It’s dangerous information. I’m not sure what you’d do with it, anyway, since you’re just a woman.”

  His comment would normally buy him a reprieve, as Cleo went into her “I’m no woman, I’m a Pack Alpha, and don’t you forget it!” routine. Too much cultural contamination from the television, he figured. The world was filling with uppity women. He had tried taking the television away from her and the other Gals, but they raised such hell he had to give the TV back. They loved the damned thing too much.

  This time, no reprieve. “Give it a rest,” Cleo said. “I need to know, dammit. We count on you.” Wiggle wiggle. He reached over to run his claws gently along her iridescent line of scales, and got his hand slapped.

  He sighed. “If you want to know, I’ll spill,” Enkidu said. This particular secret had been bothering him for months, and with things coming to a head and his recent death, it gnawed at him. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you, though.” He cleared his throat. “Our Master is a Crow.”

  “You’re shitting me,” Cleo said, flopping flat on her belly, beside him. “Wandering Shade is a Crow? But he can’t be! Crows are worthless shiftless scaredy-cats.”

  “He’s a Crow. Look, he’s got all these Crow contacts, and he’s got the ability to externally manipulate both élan and dross. That’s all Crow stuff. I got the information confirmed by an outside source. What else could he be?”

  “Why doesn’t he act like a Crow, then?”

  “He’s insane. Our Master is an insane Crow.” He had figured out the insanity part of the puzzle all on his own.

  Cleo thought for a few moments. “Okay. Say he’s an insane Crow that doesn’t act like a normal Crow. So what?”

  “So what? He’s setting up for some kind of war against the Focuses and their organization, and we’re going to be his soldiers, that’s what. Do you want to be following an insane leader using scaredy-cat Crow strategies into a war? Crows are prey, dammit!” Wandering Shade’s pathetic strategy and tactics? Exactly what Enkidu expected from a Crow.

  “He’s always been, well, a little screwy,” Cleo said. She growled and bared her teeth at Enkidu. “You just never believed me. Now, it’s too late.”

  Enkidu nodded. Cleo had always distrusted Wandering Shade. After he found out from Gilgamesh that Wandering Shade was a Crow, he found he no longer trusted his Master either. In fact, he now analyzed everything Wandering Shade did: his causes, his hates, and his passionate hates. Nothing made sense to Enkidu – until he figured out his Master wasn’t just a Crow, but an insane Crow. “We don’t have anywhere else to go. Somehow, I don’t think the Focuses would welcome us. Not after everything we’ve done.”

  “How about the talking Arm, Hancock?”

  “I’d rather die,” Enkidu said. “Besides, how would you react? You met her. She almost killed you, remember?”

  Cleo hissed. “Yesss. I’d love to sink my teeth into the bitch. So, having ascertained we have no friends in the world, did you come up with any other way out of this? Any ideas at all?”

  “No. What’s worse, I’m not in our Master’s good graces. Never have been, to tell you the truth. He sneers at me and calls me his ‘prize survivor’. Despite the fact I’m the one who’s put together the Hunter civilization for him. I tried to talk about my discovery to Odin, but he wouldn’t hear anything bad about our Master. We fought. I lost.”

  Cleo winced. “That was stupid. Odin has the open mind of a closed steel trap.”

  Enkidu sighed. Wandering Shade had been furious over his rampage in Detroit, and for some unknown reason blaming him for the Talking Arm’s strange attack on Odin’s farm. Enkidu had finally decided to act on his information about his Master, but talking to Odin was obviously the wrong thing. So now he was in the doghouse over Detroit, got to spend several hours dead, and the Detroit rampage hadn’t even worked. He never found any further sign of those Arm-Focuses or their backer.

  “But there’s your answer,” Cleo continued. “Survive. You’re right, Enkidu. You are a survivor. It’s your strength. Let’s use this. Make sure you’re not on the front lines in his fight. Make sure we all survive the fight. Come up with some intelligent contingency plans for once.”

  “You’re talking treason, Cleo.”

  “Treason? Against a Crow?” Cleo laughed. “I’m not sure that’s possible. We always thought Wandering Shade had honor. If he’s a Crow, and he’s been hiding what he is from us for so long, well then, he’s just been fooling us. Breaking his own Law. He has no more honor than any other Crow.”

  Enkidu smiled. “There is that.”

  Cleo waved her line of tiny feather tufts at him, and he pounced.

  Tonya Biggioni: November 19, 1968

  “Hancock’s the Commander,” Geraldine said. She sat on the edge of one of Tonya’s guest chairs and leaned forward intently. “I have no doubts about it.”

  Tonya’s stony aplomb vanished in a wave of shivering, and she turned her head for privacy as she fought for and regained control. She had been this close to bagging Hancock, and in just ten days her entire effort had collapsed beyond her worst nightmares. Zielinski’s offices had become the Texas Crow headquarters, making him an impossible target. The Detroit Chimera rampage shook the Council to its core, to where both Suzie and Polly had ordered Tonya to finish reeling in Hancock ‘one way or another’. Yesterday. Delia came out of this mess with a crazy and unexpected Arm tag, prattling on about how Hancock was far easier to deal with than Keaton and how the Arm had healed her from a likely fatal wound. Healed! Geraldine, kidnapped and returned whole, had witnessed the captivity of a Focus by the Chimeras, and now she spouted nonsense about ‘the Commander’.

  The damned Crow Sky was the catalyst for this entire thing. If she ever got another chance to wring his thick neck, this time she wouldn’t hesitate.

  “She admits it?” Tonya said, a whisper.

  “She denies being the Commander, she doesn’t understand what being the Commander means, but she’s cutting the Crows some slack when they use the title.” Geraldine paused. “You know the dreams and night time whispers as well as I do. She healed Delia using a juice trick. I saw her heal, dammit, with my own eyes and metasense.”

  Unexpected tears gathered in Tonya’s eyes. Rage warred with horror inside her mind. She had lost Geraldine to a goddamned Arm! She had orchestrated the destruction of the Commander!

  She should have seen the signs herself. Back from the dead. Healing. Military leadership. The overthrowing of the old order. The denial of the honors. She missed them because she wasn’t a believer. The Commander myth was far too supernatural to be real.

  The last always swung the argument in her mind.

  Tonya turned back to Geraldine, the mist in her eyes gone. “There is no Commander.” And if t
here was, the karmic debt Tonya owed Hancock for orchestrating her destruction would destroy Tonya anyway. Denial was the only logical way forward. “You’re seeing shapes in the patterns of events where no shapes exist. In the end, this will turn out to be an illusion.”

  “You aren’t going to tell the Council about what I witnessed, are you?” Geraldine said. She paled to stark white and Tonya smelled the sweat on her palms.

  “I told Polly already,” Tonya said. “She ordered me to keep it quiet. This is on Polly’s shoulders now, not ours.”

  Lori’s phone call had been the worst. Tonya had given her word to Lori that if real evidence appeared, she would bring up the kidnapping of Focus Frasier to the Council herself. Tonya’s refusal undercut two months of work to weaken Lori’s internal mental support and her external Focus support for the rebellion. The refusal now became Lori’s chief public evidence of Tonya’s corruption and malfeasance. With only two and a half months to go before the Northeast Region meeting, where the election for the Council seat would be held, Tonya didn’t have much time to recover. The only real option remained the Hancock problem, which needed to be solved by the late January meeting, and her only way forward was what she privately termed ‘political nuclear war’: exposing Hancock to the FBI and the press. Hancock would retaliate, they would likely destroy each other, and they might take down every American Major Transform in the process.

  She sensed Geraldine wavering as she stared at Tonya from across Tonya’s desk. The horror inside returned: the only way Tonya would be able to keep her seat was if she used the same blackmail tactics that Suzie Schrum and the other first Focuses used. Something she had vowed never to do.

  “I’m not sure I can do this, Tonya,” Geraldine said. She didn’t want to be on the wrong side of the political tide, always a powerful force among the Focuses.

  “I’m not sure I can, either,” Tonya said, very quiet. “I’m not sure what to do. I’ll come up with something, though.”