Whetstone came in first.
She wore a black bodysuit covered by a sleeveless gold lamé robe, and she had almost sweated through her bodysuit with nerves and excitement. She carried a leather folder under one arm. Three of her people followed her, two men and one woman, and the two men carried a heavy chest. She only claimed those three people, her entire organization here for tonight’s ceremony. She made her way down the long room, made longer by the people lined along the walls.
When she approached within a couple of yards of me, I shifted in my chair and let my predator effect free. The room became a much more dangerous place. Haggerty and Sibrian backed me up, echoed the predator and made it much worse. Gail’s jaw dropped and her people looked about ready to wet themselves, but then her eyes narrowed. With barely a pause, Gail echoed my predator effect through her juice structure and my tag, from her as a monstrous wave of Focus charisma. She glowed like a goddess, divine and majestic.
Betsy’s normals froze, incapable of further movement, and Betsy did, too. I had warned her, but this was far more than she expected. The sweat of fear beaded on her face. She sank to her knees.
“Ma’am,” she said, and then frowned at her involuntarily weak whisper. “Ma’am,” she said, stronger this time. “I come to offer myself to your service.”
“Why should I accept you into my service? Who are you and what do you claim?” Ritual. No Arm used exactly the same ceremony, but everyone used something.
“I am the Arm Elizabeth Whetstone. I claim the city of Cincinnati as my territory.” She opened the binder and laid the maps and written description of her territory down in front of me. “I claim these people as mine.” Their names and descriptions were also in the folder. I picked up the folder and made a show of reading.
“What do you offer?” I said.
“I offer a gift, to you my superior.” She took the chest from the still stunned and motionless normals behind her and opened it. Inside were several paintings, carefully packed. I read the little signature in the corner of the one on top, a starkly beautiful oil of a bleached skull, and it said ‘Georgia O’Keeffe’. Impressive. I knew she would give me a gift, I hadn’t expected something I would consider valuable.
No time for appreciation now, though.
“What do you offer?”
“I offer myself. I offer my loyalty, my service, my mind, and my body.”
“Come here.”
She walked forward on her knees until she knelt at my feet and bowed her head. I put my hands on top of her fur-like fuzzy black hair.
“I accept your service. I recognize your territory and will not hunt it. I recognize your people and will treat them gently. You are mine.”
“I am yours.”
The juice did the rest, the world folding itself inside out for a period of time that was no time at all. A different world awaited us on the other side, a world where Betsy Wetsy was no longer a threat to me and I was no longer living death to her. She was a part of my territory, my child, my treasured servant.
She looked up at me with awe and smiled. “Ma’am,” she said, suddenly happy to be here.
I stood, pulled Betsy up to her feet and turned her around in a circle to face the whole room.
“Witness. Recognize Elizabeth Whetstone. I claim her and she is mine.”
“I witness,” Haggerty said.
“I witness,” Sibrian said.
“I witness,” Gail said, which wasn’t in the script but worked anyway.
Then, finally, I let the predator effect go, and we became merely human again.
“Wow,” Gail said, her face dominated now by her smile. “That was awesome.”
“Glad you liked the show, because we’ve got another ceremony in fifteen minutes.”
“What?” she said, with a squeak.
All around the room, people sat, collapsed on the floor and catching their breath. One of Betsy’s people worked through hysterics in the corner, and another hadn’t quite gotten to the sink before he whoopsed his cookies. Ila took her own nerves out on everyone else as she tried to clean everything up for the next time. I grabbed her.
“Those three,” I said, pointing to Betsy’s two problem children, and one of Sibrian’s. “They’re not up for another round. Get them upstairs. Put the trunk and the folder in my office, and especially don’t disturb anything in the folder.”
“Yes, ma’am,” she said, and she was off, snagging hapless normals as she went, full of her own font of orders.
“Ma’am,” Betsy said, happy as a kid on Halloween and eager for some orders she could follow. She hadn’t left my elbow since the ceremony. “What do you want me to do?”
“Stand next to Mary, echo the predator effect, and witness when your turn comes.”
“Uh, ma’am, I don’t know how to do the echoing thing.”
“No time like the present to learn.” I looked around for Gail’s people, expecting at least a few of them to have fallen apart, but they stood upright, all together in the corner of the room. A little white around the eyes, but rock solid. They seemed to be drawing some sort of stability off Gail, consciously, from experience. Even the damned normals. Her husband Van wrote in a notebook, intense and happy. Unbelievable. I had never metasensed anything like this before.
Gail had the reputation as a Focus prodigy with scads of tricks nobody could understand or duplicate. I now suspected she consciously hid them, whenever possible. Given the attitude of the first Focuses, I understood her reticence.
Those days would soon be over, though.
Haggerty, back to radiating boss Arm vibes, huddled with her people, apart from the others. Only Castlemont didn’t have any trouble with the ceremony. Him I watched as he sized up the tableau and took mental pictures for future artistic reference. I repressed a sigh. Haggerty herself practically bounced on her toes, energized by the stature boost and having a blast. I felt the same way. I restrained the urge to pet Betsy, but I did grin at her affectionately. She grinned back. Haggerty, her people soothed, headed toward Gail.
Gail attracted Arms the way a beauty queen attracted teen-age boys. I hoped she would be able to cope. If not, I would get in there with the metaphorical stick and fend them off. I held off for now. Too good a learning experience for her.
Webberly came in with her Arm, Duval, eight other people and a rolling platform stacked with three wooden crates, much to my surprise. I considered the gym equipment now in my basement to be gift enough. I hadn’t expected her to show up with another.
The crates carried US military markings on the outside and military grade weapons on the inside. Automatic rifles, grenades, and a couple of Monster-caliber sniper rifles the Feds kept off the open market. Haggerty’s eyes lit up like firecrackers when she saw the spread. So did Tom’s.
Webberly handled the enhanced predator effect better than Betsy. In fact, she managed the whole ceremony with nerves of steel and a rock-solid voice, and only the sweat beading under her wiry black hair betrayed her. Duval almost panicked and ran, of course, but Webberly’s iron will held the student Arm in place. Duval’s progress impressed me, confirming the information Hank gave me. Webberly, with Hank’s help, had managed to lick Duval’s muscle problems easily, mostly because of what we now knew about a proper predator diet. Duval’s mind problems were a more difficult nut to crack, but neither Webberly nor I minded. Any Arm good enough to survive for any length of time on her own after transforming had potential, and Duval proved to be strong willed and inventive as well as twisted. Being able to tag a student Arm made things so much easier for both the teacher and student. I wouldn’t trust Duval out of Webberly’s sight around tagged Transforms yet, but in the ceremony, she wasn’t a problem at all.
The best thing? Webberly’s success kept Duval out of Keaton’s clutches. We didn’t want a repeat of the last feral Arm’s demise.
Betsy managed to echo the predator effect eventually, but she took a lot longer than Gail. Haggerty mocked Betsy’s weakness with a
twisted smile, and Betsy had to grit her teeth to keep from flushing.
At the end, I tagged Webberly, too, and she looked up at me with that happy acceptance.
“Bring on the food, Ila,” I said. “It’s time for a party.”
“Carol,” Amy said, after I gave her my latest update on my end of the Cause and the research projects. “I have a request.”
Just as anticipated. I nodded. We inhabited the hall near the coat closet, and everyone left us alone.
“I need to learn the Focus training techniques you’ve developed, so I can get my own quality Focus.” Her eyes flicked over to the hallway wall, beyond which Gail entranced a drop-jawed Betsy Whetstone in the kitchen.
“I can pass them along, of course, ma’am, but you need to understand they start with tagging.”
Haggerty didn’t say ‘oh, that’s what that is in her juice structure’, but she did think the thought. Metasense details weren’t her strength. Hank thought this came as a side effect of her ability to tolerate Monster juice.
“I guess I’ll need to learn the stable Major Transform tag trick as well,” she said, her voice radiating disgust. “Well, damn. I do have another idea I think we’ll all enjoy better.”
Such as letting me flip the damned tag? Unlikely. Instead, I nodded politely. The biggest hazard of Haggerty as a boss was the way any conversation with her generated a half-dozen more projects to work on.
“Now that we’ve got all these Arms, we need to turn this into a combat advantage.”
“How, ma’am?”
“We should be able to fight better as a group. Right now, if you and I fought some Hunter together, we’d probably do better than fighting him individually, but not nearly as well as we could. From past experience, I know we fight together well instinctively, but not particularly intelligently. I think we can learn to fight together a hell of a lot better if we put in some work. The Arm equivalent of the Focus household superorganism.”
I tried not to think too hard about what Haggerty had compared her idea to, as the ‘s’ word was one of my least favorite. Keaton and I had worked on group fighting tricks back in the early days, but we hadn’t done anything to improve ourselves since Rogue Crow’s downfall. For one of Haggerty’s wild ideas, this was a damned good one. I nodded.
“Ma’am.” Betsy caught me while I was out in the back, restlessly checking my defenses.
“Yes,” I said, gentle in the face of her eagerness to please.
“Ma’am, I know that you said that I would need to earn whatever extra benefits you might give me.”
I nodded. I hadn’t really meant what I said. She didn’t have anything to offer, but any Arm who was mine would get trained. Since she couldn’t pay, she wouldn’t get to choose what training I gave her, but I would be definitely be training her as well as protecting her. I could no more resist protecting my own than I could watch bandits carry off my children.
“Did you have something in mind?” I asked.
“Ma’am, I was wondering what it would cost to train me in whatever you’re doing with Focus Rickenbach.”
“Don’t tell me, you want a Focus of your own.”
“Yes, ma’am. An experienced and loyal Focus to manage my money would be a godsend.” So eager to please.
“I’ll tell you what. I don’t have this worked out to the point where I can train anyone else, but when I do, then we can talk.”
“Yes, ma’am. Thank you, ma’am. I really appreciate this.”
After listening to Whetstone’s request and rolling her eyes at the idea of an Arm with financial difficulties, Haggerty left for the dining room to load up on more food. She ran into Webberly there, and I winced when I heard the tone of their voices and eased over to the left a couple of feet, so I could watch through the opening.
“Don’t think the fact you’re Ma’am Hancock’s boss means you can give me orders,” Webberly said, her voice ripe with challenge.
“Nothing’s changed.” Haggerty laughed her nasty laugh. Around them, the normals eased out of the dining room, away from the conflict. “I could always tell you what to do, baby Arm.”
“Fuck yourself, asshole.”
“‘Oh, please, please don’t take New York from me,’” Haggerty said, mimicking Webberly perfectly. “‘Please, it’s my territory, I’ll do whatever you want, just please don’t do this to me.’”
Crap. I went through this nonsense the last time Haggerty was my boss and she decided she absolutely positively immediately had to challenge Keaton for overall Arm leadership. Back then I advised her in private, barely within the limits of the tag and definitely over the challenge edge, about her stupidity and lack of a chance of success. In public I stayed neutral. Haggerty, as always headblind to the nuances of upper-end Arm politics, ended up learning the hard way about her own stupidity.
On the other hand, this time Webberly did the stupid. Her Arm instincts weren’t in the least bit deficient; instead, anger and history overrode her instincts. Three years ago, Haggerty had claimed New York as her first territory, right when she got out of training with Keaton. She didn’t hold New York for long, because she always had the Feds on her ass, and they chased her out of New York as quickly as they chased her out of every city she took, the price she paid for her day job, hounding the FBI.
Unfortunately, two years ago, when Webberly graduated from her training, she also settled in New York as her first territory. Six months later, Haggerty rotated back in, reclaimed New York, and threw Webberly out. Right now, Haggerty lived in a grimy Atlanta suburb and Webberly claimed New York, but Webberly’s move wouldn’t last past the next time the FBI found Haggerty, which I expected any day now.
Webberly hated Haggerty for her actions, and Haggerty sure didn’t make things any easier. For the moment I was caught between them in the tag hierarchy, and I needed for them to be able to work together. Fortunately, the corollary to Keaton’s sneer about being less of an Arm because of my work with the other Major Transforms was the fact I possessed quite a few non-Arm tricks to pull on, if I needed them.
I did two things: I yanked on Webberly’s tag, hard, and I wiggled Mary Sibrian’s tag to lead her over. She came, tried to back off when she saw the nearly started dominance contest, but I yanked on her tag hard to make my opinion known. She stayed. Webberly immediately gave the lesser-ranked Sibrian the glare-down. Haggerty frowned at me, with no idea what I was doing. I signaled a request to let me work my magic, and her posture changed from dominant Arm to amused audience. We had played this game many times over the past three plus years.
I yanked on Webberly’s tag again, hard, when Sibrian still didn’t leave. She jumped, startled because she had so little experience with tags. She immediately came my way.
“Ma’am, I’m sorry, I don’t wish to displease you. What have I done? Please, punish me if I deserve it,” she said, brown face pale and bloodless. Yanking on her brand new tag had caused more of an impact than I had intended.
“I think we have a little problem, Rose.”
“Ma’am, not with me, I hope. I’ll do whatever you want me to.”
“Relax, I’m not mad at you.” I led the Arms out of the dining room and into the kitchen, where people scattered and I would be able to do this without an audience. I sat at the dinette table and the other three Arms echoed my actions.
I turned to Amy. “Ma’am, when we talked about our various problems with tags five months ago, you asked for a concrete example of the issues with Arm tags.” I bent my Arm predator into Focus-like charisma, searching for buy-in. “This situation is one of them.”
“Explain,” Haggerty said, unhappy, a Keatonic demand.
“Up until tonight, we only had three Arms in our organization. As Mary also wears your tag, ma’am, we didn’t have any difficulties.” Amy nodded for me to continue. Webberly for one caught the implications of my ‘our organization’ comment and the fact Haggerty hadn’t taken offense at what a more touchy Arm would have considered an explicit
challenge. “Now, our organization contains five Arms, six if we count Duval. The issue is how those Arms without standard tag links work together when they possess tag links connected through other Arms. This also illuminates the issue of the innate differences between how the tags work on each Arm. Do you agree further investigation is necessary?”
Amy leaned back and her eyes glazed over as she went into one of her analysis trances. Webberly got all anxious, finally starting to understand how little she understood Haggerty and Haggerty’s strengths, or Amy and my relationship. While Amy thought, Betsy came in and, following my signals, pulled up a chair and sat at the now overcrowded dinette table. The lure of four Arms in the same room had been impossible for her to resist.
“As we all grow experienced, our skill levels converge as our skills diverge,” Haggerty said, eyes closed. “The fact we’re in an organization will make the skill levels converge faster, as we’ll be learning from each other, and the actual skills diverge faster, as we each seek advantage over the other. The day will come, and quickly, when the current tag and challenge system leads us into a scenario where we’re spending all of our time dealing with dominance issues.”
“Exactly.”
“Ma’am, ma’am,” Webberly said. “This is my fault, then.” I metasensed her recovering from her shock over the tag-yanking and Haggerty’s ongoing analytical demonstration. Despite her words, she remained unhappy. “What kind of accommodation did you have in mind, to allow me to fix this problem?”
I shook my head, knowing her thoughts. “Relax. It’s not my place to order any Arm I have tagged to give rank to any other Arm I have tagged or who has me tagged.” Oh, I could take the easy way out and play the harsh dictator, but my instincts, what Haggerty termed my ‘charismatic thinking gestalt’, told me otherwise. I attracted Arms to me because I didn’t play the harsh dictator.
The Shadow of the Progenitors: A Transforms Novel (The Cause Book 1) Page 27
