People came crowding close, grinning from ear to ear and congratulating Van. They pulled him into the room and fed him cake, all while he looked around with the most amazing expression of astonishment.
The gathering turned into a real party then, as everyone ate and laughed, with the women Transforms she had talked to earlier rubbing up against her – with their clothes on, at least. Beth assured her the trick worked better with more skin contact, but Gail wasn’t quite up for that. At least in public. Gail mingled and smiled, while people found excuses to come by and offer her more cake and more punch. Or find out if she needed anything. After a while the Narbanors came in and joined the party, with the rest of the household that had been at the service. The Grimms showed up a few minutes later. Even the normals caught the mood, and the room became a riot of happy adults and raucous playing children.
Gail looked around at the crowd in the parlor, and admitted that she found them a lot more loveable now than before. She couldn’t say that she loved them, but she didn’t hate them any more either, and if they hated her, they kept their hatred well buried. Her new attitude about juice moving had changed things for the better.
Her eye fell on Elaine’s baby and she smiled. Little Abe had just turned one and wasn’t really a baby any more. He toddled over to the table with the cake on unsteady legs. He stuck out a pudgy hand into the side of the cake, to take a fist full of frosting. Elaine and Vic hadn’t noticed, but Ruth Narbanor did, with her experienced mother’s eye, and she intercepted the little reaching hand before he got more than a few fingers’ full. The boy hollered, but Ruth found him a small piece of cake for his own, and he sat happily on the floor, under the table.
Ruth was just starting to show and hadn’t yet broken out the maternity clothes. Gail shook her head in amazement. She had assumed their five kids would be enough. It showed what making assumptions did for her.
Elaine didn’t show at all, and as far as Gail knew, she wasn’t pregnant, but Gail didn’t expect this to last. She strongly suspected that they were already trying.
She spotted Sylvie, as she crawled under the table to visit with Abe, and felt a pang of sorrow. Sylvie, unlike the normal women in Gail’s household, was infertile, made so by her transformation. Children attracted her like a moth to flame, and her infertility still pained her. Kurt and Sylvie had looked into adoption, but Transform Sickness made them unsuitable parents in the eyes of the adoption agencies. The whole damned world was unfair, and annoyance at the unfairness built up inside of Gail.
Once she mastered this Focus thing, she would do something about the unfairness.
Over in the far corner, the older kids were talking. Gail noticed a particularly admiring look in the eyes of Narbanor’s eldest as she eyed the second oldest of the Carlow boys, and made a mental note to keep an eye on that. At least make sure the girl knew the basics of birth control. Gail liked to think fourteen was too young, but she also knew enough not to count on being right.
Trisha Bluen had changed her hair again. Her short magenta hair hurt the eyes to look at, but she looked happier than she used to. The household had mostly forgiven her for her thief boyfriend, and she worked in her own shop now. The hairdressers at her old shop had tried to bad-mouth her to her clients, but Detroit wasn’t some small rural town where everyone knew everything about everyone else. Many of her clients never got the word that she was a Transform, and they stayed with her through the change. Now, Trisha cut hair, Melanie helped her and tried to learn the skills, and the household contributed people to make the business succeed. They added little personal touches, to make the clients feel cared for, and little decorating touches to make the shop seem welcoming. The business was going upscale and Trisha’s client list was growing. Soon, Trisha would be able to raise her prices. Gail missed her old job at the Olde Oak Barrel, the one she gave up when they moved here. She also missed the good old research days. These days she spent her time strategizing finances and scouting around nearby areas for housing opportunities and business opportunities, as well as visiting with the other local Focuses. She still had a lot to learn, but she had learned a lot in the past few months.
Gail settled into her chair, watched her people and smiled. John Guynes’ oldest daughter, all of four years old, came to bring her another piece of cake, and so Gail smiled at her and thanked her politely, while over by the table, Ann Guynes watched her daughter with approval. Normals doing things for her always surprised her. The Transforms she understood, but the normals got nothing. Yet, many of them treated her with the same deference that the Transforms did. Now Ann was teaching her daughter to do so as well.
This was far from the only surprise. Melanie’s new boyfriend was another. He was a normal, but his mother was a Transform in Katie Anderson’s household down in Cincinnati. He had done most of his growing up in a Focus household. He paid for college with scholarship money and a wing and a prayer, and he had a terrible time with dorm living after the closeness of a Focus household. Gail suspected he visited not because of his fondness for the emotionally shuttered Melanie, but because he wanted to feel part of a household again.
Gail liked him. He was a sweet kid and unbelievably polite.
“Sylvie?” Gail said. Sylvie finished with tending Abe and came over, wary.
“Yes?”
“I’d like to talk to you for a moment, in private.” With the party rolling on its own, nobody would miss them. Across the room, Kurt and Vic had corralled Van, ragging on him hard about his new PhD status.
“Sure.”
Gail led Sylvie to a quiet nook barely within range of her bodyguards, and sat on the floor. Sylvie joined her.
“Do we have a problem?”
Gail smiled. “I have some disquieting news, and a proposal. Given how this crazy Transform stuff works, you might take the proposal as an order, but if you’re not comfortable with what I’m proposing, I’m ordering you to refuse it.” That bit of crack-logic was something Van had come up with to cope with situations like this. Wonderful man.
Sylvie shook her head and muttered something about wringing Van’s neck, knowing who came up with the mind-bending ideas in their household. “Hit me.”
“Yesterday, I learned from Beth about a pregnant Focus who’s about to have her baby,” Gail said. She went on to tell Sylvie about Focus Rizzari, Crow Sky and their household, Inferno. “You probably know why I’m telling you this.”
“Uh huh,” Sylvie said, tears pooling at the corners of her eyes. Gail took Sylvie’s hands in hers, carefully monitoring her household. She kept Sylvie at her juice optimum while she kept the partiers pumped and her bodyguards lower than optimum to enhance their wariness, one of the tricks she had mastered in the last month.
“You’re not a Focus, and we don’t have any Crows in our household, and I don’t know of any way to turn Kurt into a Crow, so this isn’t a solution now,” Gail said. “However, I don’t want you to give up. We’re finding out more about Transforms every day. Someday…”
“Someday,” Sylvie said. She wiped her eyes. “Thanks, Gail.” She gave Gail a hug that shivered Gail’s juice, and for a moment the juice whooshed around randomly, upsetting the nearby Transforms, but Gail got it back under control in a moment.
“The proposal is a bit dicey,” Gail said, after Sylvie untangled herself. “I’ve been talking to quite a few other Focuses recently and found out that there’s a common household position we don’t have. I want you for it.”
“What sort of position?”
“There’s a lot of names for it: Focus’s aide, Number Two, Focus’s secretary, the Lieutenant, just to name a few. You can likely match the name to the household model from our old scribble board page on household models. This is the person who speaks for the Focus when the Focus isn’t available, and the Focus’s right hand gal when the Focus is available. The position’s most commonly held by one of the Focus attendants. It’s going to be…”
“Yes!”
Gail cleared her throa
t. “This will be a lot of work.”
“Yes with cherries on top!” Sylvie gave Gail a true Sylvie 500 watt smile. “It’s time one of us got a say in what’s going on in our household. You know I’m going to be ragging on Bart, though, if you give me this.”
“Rag away. That’s what the position is for.” Gail leaned forward. “You’ll speak with my voice, and have far more responsibility than any of the other Transforms.”
That comment got a lick lip of worry. “What about Kurt?” She didn’t want to leave her young husband behind.
“Soon, but not yet,” Gail said. She had been thinking about this for two days. “Head of security. As soon as our bodyguards finish Bob Hilton’s three month course and I find a way to spring it on the old farts.” Gail’s bodyguards took their job seriously and they expected her to take their job seriously as well. After last week’s Monster rampage through Detroit that made the newspapers and national television news, her household muttered about adding more bodyguards to her detail.
“So tell me these secrets!”
“The big one is that I’m not an average Focus,” Gail said, whispering. She went on to detail what she had learned from Beth and Tonya. “This is why I demanded the Clinics send me another triad. I think I can take at least one more, but I’m worried that making us a ten triad household will make us more of a target.”
“Gail,” Sylvie said. The idea that Gail was an exceptional Focus had shaken Sylvie, and she was only partly mollified by Gail’s insistence that all young powerful Focuses resembled bulls in china shops. “You’re talking about lives. Do it.” Sylvie paused. “But only after we get Kurt in. We wouldn’t want to upset the old farts too much too soon.”
Gail chuckled at Sylvie’s ‘we’. Viva la revolución!
“Another thing you get to keep quiet about is my libido problem,” Gail said. She explained the frigid Focus issues. “Van’s love is important to me, and I’m willing…”
“Brain, you mean?”
Sylvie’s comment earned her a mock glower. “Both. I thought having an extra triad would be a huge libido improvement, but I barely noticed any changes.”
“It helped your mood,” Sylvie said. “That I noticed.”
Gail nodded.
“So how are you holding up. You, personally,” Sylvie said. “I know it’s been hard.”
Gail had to turn away from Sylvie’s vast understatement. “Yah.”
“Gail…”
She sighed. “There are times when I think I’m turning into the household drug pusher. I’ve found I like keeping people happy and I try not to get too annoyed when people do me favors just so I’ll pump their juice. But I pump them more when they volunteer to do things for the household. Do hard work. Cooperate, not fight.” Sylvie nodded. “Things are much better than when I started.” Gail still saw people’s fear of the bad times, often when she inevitably lost control of the juice when her emotions ran hot. She feared this would always be the case. “I like what Matt’s doing these days, the full immersion baptisms, his willingness to hear confessions, tolerate people putting statues of saints around the sanctuary and add Baptist spirituals to the hymns.”
“I mean you, not the household.”
Gail sighed. This, however, was why she had chosen Sylvie. “I’m still always tired,” she said. “I have a nagging headache that comes and goes, and the headache makes me testy and emotional at times. It’s often difficult for me to summon the energy to do anything.” She could live with her problems. Life wasn’t good, but it wasn’t unlivable. Her life was better than before.
“Don’t forget you can come talk to me whenever you’re feeling down. I’m here for you,” Sylvie said, giving Gail another long hug. “So, what do you think about what Bart did with the money?”
Gail welcomed the subject change. “It surprised me how much they extracted from people’s savings, but I think it’s a good thing.” Bart had gotten people to sell their old homes and add the take to the household kitty, despite their hard feelings on the subject. He wasn’t her favorite person in the world – not as her one time jailer – but he was a competent household leader. Certainly better than anything she could have done.
“Yah,” Sylvie said. “None of us want to repeat the six months we spent living in a field.”
“The hardest part, for me, is the divorces,” Gail said. The Carlows, Bartuschs and Faulkners had all divorced. Gail hadn’t been able to save a one of them.
“You’re worried about Van, aren’t you,” Sylvie said. “Don’t be.”
She picked up something from Sylvie she hadn’t expected. “Okay, what are you sitting on?” Sylvie and Van had been dating when Sylvie had introduced Van to her, followed immediately by a plea from Sylvie to take the overly serious Van off her hands. Sylvie hadn’t wanted to hurt Van’s feelings. Gail had pounced, hard, and returned the favor by introducing Sylvie to Kurt, who she had dated several times.
Sylvie shook her head. “Nope. I’m not saying another word.”
“I was thinking,” Van said, after the party, his voice soft in the quiet darkness of the room. Beth’s bedroom suggestions had worked. Sort of. Gail had actually gotten interested, actively interested, in sex, for the first time since her transformation, enough to get her to try some of the things she had learned about sex from the Grimms. No orgasm at the end, though, curse her damned transformed body. Frustrating.
The room was the church library and they had the place to themselves. The household insisted. Gail felt guilty, but not too guilty, as the church gave the household square feet to spare. It was so nice to have a private room for the two of them. They had a real bed for once, and other furniture as well. All better than their two cots in the leaky muddy-floored tent on the Ebener farm.
Gail brought herself back from metasensing the doings of her household to look at Van. She wasn’t ready to sleep yet, but she would stay with him until he drifted off, and then slip away. She had worn him out. Several times.
In the late evening, when everyone else was asleep and she was still awake, she would go down to the beautiful old sanctuary and pray. The sanctuary was a peaceful place, and all alone in the darkness, she found that prayers came easily to her there. She was embarrassed, a little bit, because she always knew she should pray more often, ever since she started going back to church, but it took Beth’s purely practical motivation to convince her to get down on her knees. She hoped God understood.
“What were you thinking?” she said, voice equally soft. She nestled her head into his shoulder.
“I was thinking about what I should do, now that I’ve finished my PhD.”
“Hmm? What did you come up with?” She knew he had been worrying this problem, off and on, for months.
Van shifted to face her.
“Have you ever thought about the beginning years of Transform Sickness?”
Gail raised an eyebrow. “What about them?” The sky had cleared, and moonlight reflected off the new snow into the room.
“I’ve heard some of the people from the other households talk. There were all sorts of things going on back then. The research, the early Focus households. It sounds like there was a lot going on as people tried to understand Transform Sickness, and the original Focuses tried to establish households. The Feds kept the Transforms in quarantine back then. I’ve been hearing stories about how the early Focuses coordinated an organized revolt to get their households out of quarantine.”
“Umm-hmm,” Gail said, twirling his chest hair with her finger.
“So I was thinking that might be an interesting subject to write a book about.”
“What?”
“It’s a little out of my specialty, but it’s still history,” Van said, intent. “Nobody’s ever written a book on the subject. I checked. I think I could do it. If the Focuses will talk to me, I could get hold of information unavailable to the other historians. Tell the Focuses’ story, what they were doing and thinking. Nobody’s ever done anything like this.”
“Oh, wow. That’s great,” Gail said, caught by Van’s vision. “Since more people keep catching Transform Sickness every day, people are going to start to be interested in things like this. You’re in a perfect position to do it.”
“So you agree?” Van said. “You’ll support me on this?”
“Oh, absolutely. It’s a wonderful idea.”
“I’m going to need your help,” he said. “Those Focuses won’t talk to some random normal, and I’ll need better Focuses than the ones you’ve talked to in the Young Focus League.” She had talked to the head of the League, Linda Cooley of Chicago, who sounded like an unworldly radical leftist airhead. Van had been even less impressed. “I’ll need you to introduce me and convince them to talk to me.”
“Right, right. This doesn’t work if you don’t have the information from the Focuses who were there. I can make some calls. We ought to find a few of them willing to talk to you.”
“You mean it,” Van said. “I can do this book. Some publisher out there somewhere will be willing to publish something like this.”
They talked into the night, then. About his book, his idea. Plans and hopes and dreams. Gail lay next to him and it warmed her down to her toes to hear him happy and planning for the future.
They drifted off, eventually, and lay close and silent. The moon slipped behind the church, sending the room into darkness. After a long time, Van spoke again.
“I was thinking about another thing,” he said.
“Hmm?” Gail said, drifting and relaxed, almost asleep herself.
“We seem to be pretty settled now. Neither of us is in school,” Van said, his voice soft in the darkness. “What do you think about getting married?”
“What?” Gail said, and startled up in the bed in shock. This was what Kurt and Sylvie had been hiding. Van would have never brought this up without running the idea by them first.
“I can’t promise an income,” he said. “This book idea might never produce any money at all.”
Gail shook her head. “I never expected you to support me. But…” she paused, a little in fear, a little in self-anger, “you know I can’t have children.”
In this Night We Own (The Commander Book 6) Page 30
