Tears flowed from Gail’s eyes as the song continued, and from her people as well, and I caught tears in the eyes of several others around the room. Disconcerting, in a room full of such hard men and women. Mary finished the song, and the last notes trailed off to silence, except for the sounds of several covert sniffles.
“Thank you,” Gail said in a whisper. “Thank you very much.”
“Gail,” I said without words, just a gentle tug on her tag to attract her attention. Sibrian still played softly in the dark room. No one noticed as Gail slipped away and came upstairs with me, followed only by the intricately beautiful music of Sibrian’s guitar, finishing up the Arm theme song, ‘Walking After Midnight’.
“I don’t know if you’d want me or my people looking into the baby Arm disappearances or not, but I’m not the only reporter and investigator in my household,” Gail said. “The problem fits right in with the Transform rights work we do.”
“Good. Working the problem with something other than an Arm’s perspective would help,” I said, pleasantly surprised with Gail’s suggestion. I should have seen this coming – volunteering was her strength, her household’s strength, and she was as much of a politician as myself. Street politics was her baby. She needed something to balance the scales against what I did for her. “Not you, not directly. Your training is too important. Others in your household can work this, but only if they can be very discrete. Information only, no covert operations.” I added the last bit at the last moment, surprised to find the warning necessary. I wondered what covert operations her people did, anyway.
Gail nodded, and then stopped. “Teacher?” she whispered with wide eyes as she looked around my bedroom.
“Shh,” I said, my own voice low. “It’s time to start you on a different kind of training.”
“What kind of training?” She looked wary. A bedroom wasn’t where she expected to receive training, or at least not training she wanted any part of. Especially not a bedroom that looked like mine.
I smiled. “You’ll like this one,” I said as I took her hands and pulled her farther into the room.
“What?” she said, as I pulled her closer and began to undo the zipper on the back of her elegant gown.
“Ah, Teacher, what are you doing?” She didn’t try to stop me, but her eyes were wide.
“Not all lessons are unpleasant.” I whispered in her ear as I slipped the gown off of her shoulders. “If you’re going to pass me juice, you need to master this, and this is going to take some practice.”
“Ah, I don’t normally, ah. I’m not really into women, you know. And I’m married.”
I smiled again. “It’s not sex. Quite. But skin contact is necessary.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Shh. You’ll find out. Until then, relax. You’ll enjoy this.”
I slipped the gown the rest of the way off. As I did so, I let her feel my juice as I brushed my hands along her skin. Just a tingle on her nerves, but she caught her breath. I took care of my own clothes smoothly and pulled us toward the bed.
Then I wrapped my arms around her and held her against me. I let go of my defenses, and let the juice cycle flow between us. Gail moaned with astonishment and pleasure and her weight fell against me. I slowly let us fall onto the bed.
We experienced bliss, there on that oversized bed, as the juice cycled round and round between us, stroking all those nerves that so loved the movement of the juice. I held Gail in my arms as she learned pleasure in a way she had never known.
For the first time in weeks, my night’s sleep wasn’t bothered by nightmares.
A Bed of Shit-Stained Roses
“Is the Crow ‘listening to the auroras’ trick a method of communication with the Crow version of the Dreaming, or are they communicating with the Progenitors?” – from Arm Haggerty’s Speculative Projects List
Gail Rickenbach: July 26, 1972
Gail stretched languidly and looked around. The juice cycling had been wonderful. Her nerves still tingled with pleasure, and for one of the few times since her transformation, she lusted for some serious snuggle time with her husband.
Fabulous, she thought as she wiggled just for fun. She found herself looking around at Teacher’s bedroom in the light of the just-rising sun. Such an unnerving place, a place for sex rather than for sleep, and twisted sex at that. Teacher hadn’t used any of the equipment on her, thankfully.
Gail shivered. This room shed a new light on some things she hadn’t understood before. Teacher’s willingness to hurt her, and the small smile that sometimes slipped out when she did so. Teacher wasn’t a nice person.
But oh, last night’s ‘lesson’ had been magnificent. Gail still felt warm tingling energy rolling through her, and an urgent hunger of a kind she hadn’t felt since her transformation four years ago. Which, she decided, she needed to do something about. Van had to be around here somewhere.
Gail extended her metasense and found Teacher in the gym, doing her morning exercises. She watched for just a moment, cynically wondering if Teacher worked herself as hard as she made Gail work, or if the workouts she put Gail through were just some expression of her cruelty.
The answer, Gail noted with disgust, was that Teacher worked herself far harder than she worked Gail. Gail made a face, and Teacher smiled back at her.
Gail looked away. Melanie and Sylvie were much closer, fast asleep in bedrooms down the hall, which meant Van probably was too. She hated being in new places like this because she had to work extra hard to metasense normals. She stood up and snagged her clothes from where they had fallen, and found a note lying on the nightstand beside the bed.
Gail,
I hope you enjoyed yourself, because we’ll be doing that a lot more. You need to learn to handle yourself in that condition in order to give me juice. Wait for me. I’ll come to you again.
Enjoy it. This is the feel of a kill as the juice flows in. A trade – you share juice with me, I’ll share an Arm’s pleasure with you. Keep up your exercises and your juice pattern practice. The Good Doctor will be stopping by your household later today to work with you on the juice patterns. I’ll come by tomorrow night for some more training.
Go screw your husband.
Dream of me, though.
Carol
‘Dream of me.’ Gail would. So wonderful. So pleasurable. No wonder they loved to kill.
She found Van two rooms down, sharing a room with Bart Wheelhouse. Gail slipped silently over to the bed where he lay sleeping and crept under the covers next to him.
“Urgmph?” Van said, a bleary mumble as Gail tried to make room for herself next to him in the narrow bed.
“Hunh?” Bart sat up in bed, awakened by the noise, and rubbed his hand through his thinning hair. He pulled his T-shirt down again over his small pot-belly.
“Oh, good, Gail,” he said, after he blinked a few times, in a voice still hoarse from sleep. “We need to get out of here.”
Gail had managed to slip under the covers and reached a hand down into Van’s underwear. “What?” he said, only slightly more awake. Van had never been one to wake up easily.
“Later,” Gail said to Bart.
“Gail,” Bart said, in that authoritative tone that always made her feel so childish. “We shouldn’t stay here in this Arm’s house any longer than necessary.”
Bart was the official representative of the household’s leadership committee, and they sent him specifically to keep an eye on things and prevent them (read ‘Gail’) from getting into trouble. Gail knew she should follow Bart’s advice, she just wasn’t interested right now.
“We’ll leave in an hour or so. In the meantime, why don’t you give us some privacy?” Her wandering hands found some interesting things, and Van was very definitely waking up.
“Gail,” Bart said, more than a little frustrated. She ignored him, as she had every intention of spending some time with Van. He put up with her so patiently even despite her transformation-induced disin
terest in sex; she wasn’t about to miss this opportunity.
Bart would just have to wait.
Van’s hands stroked along her sides and up to her breasts. Every touch tingled, and she caught her breath with the sudden sensation, so unlike her body’s usual deadened numbness.
“I’m not here to argue,” Gail said, her voice ice cold. “I’ll come get you when I’m ready. In the meantime, go somewhere else, because Van and I need privacy.”
Bart went, collecting his clothes in abrupt angry motions on the way out.
Gail ignored his response. Van nibbled on her earlobe and she had other priorities.
“So,” Van said, tracing little circles in the sweat between her breasts. “You really enjoyed yourself this time, even better than when you spend time cuddling with the women to get your juice count up.”
Gail laughed breathlessly. ‘Like’ didn’t begin to describe how she felt. Sex hadn’t been this nice since she transformed into a Focus. She didn’t think sex had been this good even before then. She dug her chin into his shoulder. “Yeah.” She didn’t even bother to comment on the fact Van knew about the cuddling trick. The book Van wrote about the history of the Focuses allowed him to discover all sorts of interesting people and information.
Downstairs, Teacher finished her exercises and made breakfast. She had been watching them the entire time. Disquieting, but an expected detriment of being around other Major Transforms. They certainly hadn’t done anything Teacher hadn’t seen or done before.
Gail didn’t think she could even imagine anything Teacher hadn’t seen or done before.
“Did you sleep with her?”
Gail looked over at Van’s frowning face. He did way too much thinking for a man whose wife had just screwed his brains out. “Would sleeping with her bother you?”
Van thought before he answered. Van always thought before he said anything. “I don’t think it would be smart. You don’t know what you’re getting into, and you don’t have any control over the situation.”
Well, that very neatly summed up a big problem. “I didn’t sleep with her, but I still don’t know what I’m getting into, and I still don’t have any control over the situation.”
Van frowned a little more, but his eyes danced with humor. He had beautiful eyes, Gail noticed, pale blue with long dark lashes. It was too bad his glasses hid them so much of the time. “So what exactly did she do to you?”
“She has a trick where the juice cycles around through both of us at the same time. She says I need to learn to deal with, um, this, um, in order to give her juice. She says this is what an Arm kill feels like.”
“Did you like the juice cycling?”
Gail nodded. Van leaned back in the narrow twin bed and fell silent for a long time.
“Van? What are you thinking?”
“I’m thinking she’s doing some pretty dangerous things to you. This sounds very similar to something Focus Rizzari told me about regarding her interactions with Arm Hancock, about three or four years ago. Right before Focus Rizzari turned into Lady Death. What turned Focus Rizzari into Lady Death.” He gave her the ‘pay attention, I’m being serious’ look.
“I know,” Gail said in a low voice. She remembered meeting Focus Rizzari at her wedding reception, just before the Detroit fight. Focus Rizzari had been on edge, an edge Gail hadn’t been able to figure out at the time, but one that reminded Gail of her current situation. Less than an hour later, Focus Rizzari killed the traitorous Focus Anderson and some of Anderson’s Transforms with a juice attack, and nearly got killed herself. Now Teacher led Gail down the same path.
Van turned back to her. “Can you cope?”
“I hope so. I don’t exactly have any other choice right now. What’s happening’s been rough, but I’ve been coping so far.”
“So far.”
Gail shrugged. “And maybe things won’t all be bad. I am learning, and there’s this juice cycling trick.” She smiled a little bit. “You don’t mind that this makes me interested, do you?” Gail nibbled his ear. Maybe he had enough energy for one more time.
“Again?” he asked. Gail grinned.
---
When they returned, she and Van learned that the leadership committee had staged the expected coup, tossing Van from the house president position and reinstating Manfred Cadriel. They refused to given any explanation beyond ‘it was time for a change’. Sylvie and Kurt were furious, as they thought Van had done an excellent job this time, but Van talked them down. “Too much conflict of interest right now,” he said.
Two days later, Hancock showed up at Gail’s household for her usual training session, just as harsh and cruel as if she had never showed Gail any glimpse of gentleness and pleasure.
Gail wove her way carefully through the packed tables of the dining room. The tiny place was crammed tight with people, the noise of dinner conversation a rumbling roar. They packed three church tables into an apartment’s former living room and squeezed ten folding chairs around each one. Everyone needed to turn sideways to make their way from the front door to the kitchen doorway and the food service. Gail stood in line for the food with everyone else, if only because no one could have moved out of her way anyway.
Gretchen Carlow and her two younger sons did dinner duty, serving up the food like clockwork. Chicken and dumplings today, with boiled red cabbage on the side. The youngest son, Mike, dished out the food from a small table at the kitchen entryway while Gretchen worked the kitchen itself and the middle son worked in the back room with all the pre-prepared food.
The Carlow’s eldest son had left the household two months ago. Eighteen years old, and after four years of helping Buddy Attendale fix the household’s cars, he was an experienced enough mechanic to find a job at an auto repair shop.
Mike Carlow dished out the last of the chicken and dumplings onto Trisha’s plate, right ahead of Gail, but Gretchen had another huge pot ready and waiting, and whisked the main course into place immediately.
“Here you go, Focus,” Mike said as he ladled the hot dumplings onto Gail’s plate. Two dumplings and a pile of steaming chicken. Gail stopped and looked.
In the kitchen, Gretchen cleared her throat. “Who are you serving to, Mike?”
“Oh. Whoops. Sorry, Focus,” Mike said. He was a cute kid, thirteen years old and his voice had just come in as a sturdy baritone, odd coming from a boy still shorter than Gail. He ladled another full helping of chicken and dumplings onto her plate and then followed with a double helping of the cabbage.
Gail despised boiled cabbage, but she didn’t bother to argue. Everyone in the household knew their Focus needed more food than a normal, and made sure Gail got double servings of everything. They would nag her if she didn’t finish her food, too. “Thanks, Mike,” she said, as she turned to find herself a seat.
Which wouldn’t be easy, not during the main dinner rush. Of the three tables, one held some of the younger crowd, Kurt and Sylvie, the Armelins and their kids, and Trisha. The second held the Attendales on one end and a bunch of teenagers at the other, as far from their parents as they could get. The third table held some of her older folks, the Grimms, the Wheelhouses, Vera Bracken, and Manfred Cadriel.
Gail sighed. She would rather go sit with Kurt and Sylvie, but she wasn’t down here for her own entertainment. She made a point of eating dinner with everyone else at least three times a week, and sat with different people every time. She should really go sit with the Attendales, but she wasn’t up to an entire dinner of listening to those two whine. Instead, she compromised and found a seat at the third table.
“Conserving money is fine, but find some other place to conserve besides toilet paper,” Vera Bracken said to Helen Grimm. Vera was an elegant woman in her late forties, with a job as an executive secretary for a medium-sized auto parts supplier.
“Toilet paper is expensive in the amounts we use,” Helen said. She was about a decade older than Vera, and she wore her makeup thick and brilliantly colored, as bright
as her striking orange hair.
“TP’s not that expensive,” Vera said. “The last brand you got was just fine. The problem’s this new stuff.”
“We don’t need to waste money to be comfortable when we wipe our hinies,” Helen said.
“We don’t have to wipe our hinies with sandpaper, either.” Vera did have a point. The latest round of single-ply toilet paper could put a fine finish on a two-by-four.
“We don’t have money to waste on luxuries,” Manfred said. Their new house president was a soft-spoken billing clerk no one had expected much of during his first run as house president. A short, small and balding man, the household elected him the first time because Helen and Sylvie split the women’s vote, and because nobody wanted Gail taking another turn at the position. None of them appreciated her Socratic method of house leadership. She couldn’t blame them, as she had adopted the style simply so her people wouldn’t get too used to her being prime minister as well as queen.
“Decent toilet paper isn’t a luxury,” Vera said. “The current toilet paper is awful. You can barely stand to use it.”
“Well then maybe people won’t use as much,” Helen said. “Do you know how much toilet paper we go through? Do people think money just grows on trees? We can’t afford all the toilet paper people do use. I still think we need to ration it, so people quit using so much.”
“We can’t ration toilet paper, Helen,” Bart said. “What would we do if someone went over their limit? Tell them, no, you can’t use any more?”
“How much are we saving on the new toilet paper?” Gail asked.
“Fourteen cents for eight rolls,” Helen said.
The Shadow of the Progenitors: A Transforms Novel (The Cause Book 1) Page 29
