The Shadow of the Progenitors: A Transforms Novel (The Cause Book 1)

by Randall Farmer

  “Well, if we’re working this as an official Cause project, I can live with that. I have a few questions to ask you along those lines, myself,” Tonya said. She was a damned eel. “What are you looking for? Just a young Focus, or do you have other requirements?”

  “About four or five years old, with top-end talent in all areas. It would be good if she were also open-minded and flexible. Oh, and she needs to be living in the Midwest Region.”

  “I’m so glad you gave me a lot of choice to work with,” Tonya said, after a noticeable pause. Funny. She sounded as exasperated with me as I was with her. I didn’t snicker, but I wanted to. “Since you’ve already decided who you want, why are you bothering with the charade?”

  “Oh, you have to do that with Focuses. If they don’t think they’re manipulating something, they get constipated. Have you decided which Focus you’re going to give me?”

  I heard Tonya’s teeth grinding all the way from Philadelphia.

  “Okay, then, I have someone for you,” Tonya said. “Done the name Gail Rickenbach ring a bell?”

  “Oh, she will do just fine,” I said. Exactly who I wanted, of course. Yup, I was moving to Detroit.

  Biggioni never did get around to warning me to stay away from the FBI.

  ---

  “You don’t have to be quite so gentle with me,” Tom said. “I won’t break.”

  I looked at him and grinned. I would be gentle with him whether he wanted me to or not. He was the most precious thing I owned. Besides, this was my first Detroit kill, which did make things special. A newly transformed woman, ripe with juice and with no Focus yet. She hadn’t even known she had the Shakes. She had been a fabric quality inspector at the local mill, and I caught her at dawn on her way to work. Ecstasy.

  I worried, though. The kill had been too difficult to come by in this day of ever-increasing transformations. If I didn’t know the home of every Arm in the US, I would almost suspect some other Arm was hunting my new territory.

  I ran my finger down Tom’s sweating chest and admired him. Forty-three years old, skin a medium brown, he was hard and hard-used. He stretched, relaxing in the steamy post-sex glow. Impulsively, I grabbed him back to me and held him tight.

  He was beautiful, wonderful, talented, and a good lover, too. I had recruited him four years ago, and he was one of my three top lieutenants, and the only one of them I slept with. My real lover, where all the others were just pale substitutes who I only used at all because I refused to burn Tom out while attempting to sate my needs.

  “You all right?”

  “Yeah, I’m fine,” I said.

  He pulled back and looked me in the eyes. “Really?” He had beautiful eyes, rich and brown and dangerous.

  I sighed. “Fuck.” After four years, he read me nearly as well as I read him.

  He nodded, and leaned his head back on the pillow. “How long are we out of Chicago for?”

  “No idea,” I said. “At least long enough for the hunt to cool down. Worst case? Permanently.”

  “You coping all right?”

  Was I coping all right? Hah! Chicago was my territory, my love, my pride and joy. Leaving Chicago cut at my soul. Losing territory hurt a lot.

  “I’m not as bad off as if I was forced out by another Arm or by the goddamned Hunters,” I said. I remembered all the work spent clearing Chicago of the Hunters, and I ached inside.

  Tom looked at me, doubting. He knew me too well. He had all of my people treating me like a stressed out Focus, with little presents of food, everything clean and spotless, everyone overly polite. Gaah. Made me want to wear a sundress, sit in an easy chair, sip tea and plot out how to backstab my allies with sly innuendo, artless gifts and false compliments.

  “Okay, I’m hurting,” I said. “I’ll get over the hurt in time.”

  He accepted my explanation and kissed me, long and deep and hot, waking urges that hadn’t been asleep in the first place, not immediately post-kill. I pushed him away, before I gave into my urges and did something I would regret. We had done enough, and I had no intention of pushing his limits. He was forty-three years old, and I refused to burn him out.

  “How bad off are our finances?” I asked. With Amy bossing me around and demanding I continue with the research projects, I had pawned off the financial work on him. Well, running around my financial people.

  I put work into controlling my breathing. I really wanted to jump him and go on to other things.

  Tom raised his eyebrows, and rubbed his knee slowly between my legs. “Stop that!” I said, and he grinned.

  “You’re not done, and I’m not that fragile,” he said.

  “Money?”

  He shrugged. “We have enough to get by. Littleside is expensive. With Sammy gone, we’re going to have a problem with research.” He looked away, still not over Sammy’s death. Sammy had been one of his, and while normals didn’t understand possession the way Arms did, he had still cared for Sammy, and his loss when my house burned still hurt.

  “I know. I’ll do some recruiting.”

  “Even if you find us a replacement, it’ll take a while before he gets up to speed. Our Arm-trained operatives are far above your run of the mill gangsters and buttonmen. We’ve got a few jobs already in the pipe, but we’ll still likely have a lean period.”

  “Yeah. That’s not a good thing, because despite how bad things are now, there’s worse coming.” I just hoped Amy and Gilgamesh were wrong and I wasn’t up against senior Crows. They always made such a chowder out of normal life. “I’d like us to have a good padding of cash.”

  “What kind of trouble?”

  I shrugged. “More trouble. I think I’m going to see if I can find you a couple of research guys, and maybe we can step up our moneymaking effort as soon as they’re ready.”

  He nodded. “Whatever you command. I’m yours.”

  ‘I’m yours’, he said, aiming right for my soft spots. I pulled back and eyeballed him suspiciously.

  He smiled. “I’m yours. Do you remember when you recruited me? How much it took to get through my bullheaded skull?”

  Oh, yes, I remembered. I could feel the heat between my legs at the mere thought. “You’re an evil man,” I said to him, as my good intentions collapsed.

  He smiled, and whispered into my ear, “I heard that you liked it so much that you used to pull Darryl into your bed every night, just so you could pretend he was me.”

  All right, I thought, as my body responded to his whispered words, maybe I did get carried away with the gentle treatment. Tom was tough as old shoe leather, and he wouldn’t have a heart attack just from some intense sex. I pulled him to me, and wiggled in just exactly the right way. He caught his breath as his own body responded to mine, fast and hard.

  “Mommy?” Stephanie said.

  There in the doorway, all of four years old, peered Stephanie Abbott, Ila’s youngest daughter.

  Fuck!

  “Ila!” What the hell was her kid doing in my bedroom? Tom grabbed the sheet and pulled it over us.

  Stephanie froze, her eyes wide. She figured out she wasn’t supposed to be in here, but she just stood there. Where the hell was Ila? Then I remembered hearing Ila’s voice, back when Tom and I had been distracted the first time. Something about going out to look at real estate, and could Darryl watch her kids?

  Fuck! The kid was supposed to know better than this.

  Crap, she did know better, but only back in my old house. All of Ila’s kids knew they weren’t supposed to go upstairs, but my Detroit safe-house was a small three bedroom ranch, and the little girl had no idea my bedroom just down the hall was off limits.

  Darryl showed up, finally, running in from the kitchen, and snatched the little girl into his arms. He was a big black man, with an afro that practically filled the doorway, but he was a teddy bear at heart. He got a look at Tom and me, and flushed.

  “Boss, Sir,” he said to Tom and me. “Sorry about this. I was in the kitchen getting the kids a snack
, and…”

  “Out. Take Stephanie and get out of here.” Then I spotted Ila’s other two kids peering around him to see what the excitement was about. “And the rest of them, too.”

  He got. I flopped back down on the bed.

  “Fuck. We’ve got to get a real house. I sure as shit hope Ila finds something while she’s out.”

  “Uh huh,” Tom said, disgusted.

  I looked over at him, and raised an eyebrow. He smiled back at me. Then he slipped of the bed and knelt at the edge.

  “I’m yours,” he said. “I’m going to kiss your feet.” He pulled one of my feet over to him, and proceeded to suck on my toes, one by one.

  Oooh, there went the last of my good intentions. All I had left was a grin and a moan and some very urgent needs. If any more of Ila’s kids showed up, they would just get to watch, because I wasn’t stopping now.

  Later that night, after an unexpected and unwanted nightmare about unseen boogie-monsters chasing me around, I snuck into the Iron Man Gym.

  A gym. Disgusting. Once, my home included a basement filled with gym equipment, a full setup, enough so that I didn’t have to use the public gyms. The gym was gone now, burned into char with the rest of my house. Then I used the warehouse storeroom in my back-up Chicago place and Greg’s new set of gym equipment. Well, I hoped the FBI enjoyed my fancy gym, because they inherited the equipment when they grabbed my backup lair. Now? Sneaking into gyms, like a junior Arm just out of her training.

  I couldn’t skip the whole exercise business, because I was an Arm. Bad things happened to Arms who didn’t keep their muscles in condition, as I knew from personal experience.

  Iron Man Gym was a bodybuilder’s gym, located in an old commercial and light industrial district just east of River Rouge Park, and they possessed the equipment I needed most. As I crept into the gym, I smelled an odor.

  A gym is a place of many odors, and I knew them and expected them: old sweat, metal, chalk, and mold. Dozens of different odors. I knew them.

  I didn’t expect the scent of an Arm.

  Another Arm in Detroit. Damn. I had been right when I picked up the earlier Arm signs. For a moment, my mind played its devious tricks on me. As with many of the gyms these days that played to a rough crowd, the Iron Man Gym had Arm posters all over the place. Yes, Arm posters, Mary Sibrian’s idea. One of the ways she made her money. Underground as all hell, but every bong shop on the planet sold the damn things. We had all had fun posing, even Keaton, all of us disguised enough to keep the posters from being a security risk. Not only disguised, but Mary herself did the airbrushing afterwards to hide distinctive features and add false distinctive features. I, for instance, didn’t have a Marine Corp tattoo on my right biceps.

  Haggerty had personally signed her poster, and for a moment, the recent Arm smell and Amy Haggerty’s lingering scent on the poster made me believe Haggerty had decided to claim Detroit, just to piss me off. I practically knifed the damned poster before I got a grip. The stench wasn’t Haggerty. I knew her scent too well.

  No, this Arm wasn’t one I had ever smelled before.

  The bitch probably thought Detroit was her territory. Right, sure. The only Arms besides Keaton and Haggerty able to challenge me for a territory and win were Armenigar in Canada and Eissler in West Germany. This scent wasn’t theirs.

  Was this Haggerty’s theorized secret uberpowerful enemy? Given her current winning streak, I couldn’t discount the possibility.

  The night was hell, watching over the gym every minute, waiting for the Arm to show. The day was no better. The thought of some other powerful Arm in my territory triggered my Arm instincts in a very bad way. Territory is life for an Arm. The possibility gnawed at me. I couldn’t think. I paced and raged and worried. My stomach churned, and I couldn’t eat properly. My muscles got stiff from the lack of exercise and the long inaction of the night.

  At eleven the next night, the last muscle man left the Iron Man Gym and the manager locked the doors. I watched from the gravel and tar roof of the small office building across the street. No sign of the Arm.

  I made myself inconspicuous, masked my metapresence, the works. The element of surprise might make all the difference in the world in the off chance I faced super-Arm, and so I damped my juice emanations like a paranoid senior Crow adulterer. I would wait until the Arm got heavily involved in her workout, say, doing chest presses, and then take full advantage of the situation.

  Three, almost four hours passed. The mosquitos held a fiesta and invited all their friends and families. I still didn’t move.

  At 2:43 in the morning, she came.

  She slipped quietly up to the door and opened it with a key. She eased inside.

  I followed.

  After all the hours of anger and fear and tension, the actual fight turned out to be an anti-climax. I burned juice when I charged, catching her doing something that would have been seated toe raises if she hadn’t been messing up her form. I moved with all my speed and skill, and slammed her against the wall. I knocked the breath out of her and broke several ribs. My knife went into her gut, and then again into her right armpit and cut the muscles there, then I grabbed her left arm and tore the shoulder out of its socket. To finalize the deal I plunged my knife into her chest just under her breastbone and rested the knife against her heart.

  Only then did I realize I didn’t face super-Arm. My enemy hadn’t even attempted to fight back. Hell, by the time my knife touched her heart, she had only started to scream.

  “No! No! Please!”

  I cut her off with a vicious blow across the face. Then, still holding my knife in her chest, I let her sink to the ground.

  She whimpered and mewed with agony and fear. Tears flowed out of her eyes. Tears! From an Arm! She was a pitiful and repulsive creature.

  “Who are you and what are you doing here?” I said. Fury and the now unnecessary fear made my voice harsh enough to astonish even me.

  “I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to! Please!” she said, between sobs.

  I hit her again. The skin on her face split, and her eye began to swell.

  “Answer the question, bitch. Who are you?” My voice filled with fury, fury at her for invading my turf, and fury at her for scaring me so much.

  “Chrissie. I’m Chrissie Duval,” she said, through her sobs. She shivered. She kept trying to move her useless arms toward the knife in her chest, but she couldn’t make them function.

  “What are you doing here? Where did you come from? Are you the one behind the Phoenix Church Massacre?”

  She gasped several times and tried to form words, but she just huddled and shivered and cried.

  I hit her again across the face. She cried some more.

  She possessed no self-control; this was almost like dealing with a normal. From her smell, though, this Arm hadn’t transformed recently. The initial transformation was long over.

  Fuck. I would get nothing out of her this way. I pulled my knife from her chest. She did her best to curl into a ball, arms still flopping uselessly, and she cried hysterically.

  I studied her and shook my head. Her muscles weren’t built right, all lumpy, bulging in odd places, and too small. She appeared to be more like one of Keaton’s students than a mature Arm. A flawed student. She was likely dead unless Keaton or Zielinski found some way to fix her muscles.

  This wasn’t a challenge, this was a joke. Fury still filled me, but letting loose my fury wouldn’t buy me anything more than a few hours of entertainment. I wanted more out of this fool than a session with my beast. I had already let my beast out of her cage twice since the FBI shut down my Chicago businesses.

  I lifted her up with one hand and pinned her against the wall by the neck. With my other hand, I laid my knife across her neck.

  “Where are you from?”

  Her sobs caught in her throat as she tried to force words out. I flicked a little bit of skin loose with the point of my knife, and she shivered. The smell of her terror rolled off h
er in waves.

  “T-T-Toronto.”

  So she was a Canadian Arm, with enough native talent to hide her accent. The idiot must have pissed off the Ontario Local of the International Sisterhood of Socialistically Stupid Focuses, who probably sweet-talked Armenigar into coming by and chasing this moron out of Canada.

  “What the fuck are you doing here, skag?”

  “Please,” she said, whimpering, as tears mixed with blood leaked down her cheeks.

  I slammed her against the wall again, hard. Her head hit with a bang and she screamed, a small, breathless sound that cut short when I pushed my knife against her throat again. Blood ran down her neck from the knife’s sharp edge and she swallowed convulsively.

  “I asked you a question, bitch. I didn’t tell you to grovel. When I want groveling, I’ll damned well let you know. Answer the fucking question!” Jesus Christ, what a loser. No self-control, no competence, and she couldn’t even grovel decently. Even one of Keaton’s students managed decent courtesy in a couple of weeks, and after a couple of months learned enough self-control to avoid falling apart during heavy questioning. Did this woman get no training at all?

  “I-I-I was l-looking for a city,” she said, barely, through her sobs and shivers. Her limbs twitched helplessly, raising an urge inside me to cut ribbons from her skin.

  “How old are you?”