“Shit,” Gail said, and stuck her tongue out at Gilgamesh. “I don’t want to think about that. I know Carol can find me some more women for the household, but there’s only so many total Transforms you and I can support. We’re going to end up trading men’s lives for woman’s lives again.”
Gilgamesh nodded. “Yes, and there’s also the fact that when you gave Carol juice, you produced the most amazing mound of dross I’ve ever seen. Hot and spicy and sweet, all at the same time. Arm-produced dross by itself is addictive enough to have changed my life, and this new stuff is going to be much more addictive. I’m afraid this is going to ruin the lives of many Crows, especially since I think you’ll be producing more than even I need. There might even be enough here to partly support a Chimera.”
“This juice music score is just the beginning,” Gail said. “We need more Focuses willing to help us perfect it and up the efficiency. More Crows and Arms. Perhaps even a Noble or two, to see if we can attach them to a household. Élan is just juice and dross mixed together; the two of us, working together, should be able to make élan for Nobles without much of a problem at all.”
Gilgamesh smiled. “With this and the household tuning and fatherhood, there ought to be a few interested Crows out there. You’re right, though. We’re not done figuring everything out, not by any stretch of the imagination. Our two enhanced households are churning out far too much dross, even before we added in Arm support to the equation. We’re still missing many necessary tricks.”
“We’ll need to keep working,” Gail said, and leaned into Gilgamesh’s embrace.
Carol Hancock: December 14, 1972
Gail had given me juice! I was on a plane to Keaton’s house, and it was all I could think about. Gail gave me juice! The thought made my nerves sing. I wanted to laugh, or dance, or shout for joy. Success!
Oh, it had been so beautiful. Such a small amount, only five points or so, but just as good as five points from a kill. Delicious, ecstatic, orgasmic. Heaven, and all from my beautiful, precious Gail.
I found my face stretching into a smile yet again. Haggerty, across the aisle where we sat in first class, looked at me oddly, and then frowned as she shifted the metal contraption on her leg. McIntyre, safely on the other side of her, didn’t look at me at all.
Lori sat beside me, studying Zielinski diagrams, practicing tiny juice music scores and combating her jealousy with a tightly clenched jaw.
Gail and I would need to try it again as soon as I got back home. I couldn’t imagine the transfer would be as good as I remembered, and I knew it would be even better, as Gail mastered the skill. Oh, there would be failures and mistakes, but she would steadily improve. She would give me more than five points soon, probably more than ten not long after that. As much as a real kill? Almost certainly, eventually. More? Even that was possible.
She was so beautiful. So earnest, so idealistic, so stubborn. I smiled again just to think of her. Her bouncing step, her determined frown, her acres of shining chestnut hair. Her juice structure, winding, complex, perfect. I could sit for hours, lost in the beauty of her juice structure.
I ached when I considered how precious she was to me. With that one act, that one juice pattern, with the passage of those few points of juice, she was now my most precious possession. More than my people, even more than Chicago. Leaving her alone terrified me. What if Adkins attacked? Or some other power-mad Transform? The thoughts made me sick. I wanted to be there standing guard over her every minute of the day, and I could do no such thing.
I loved her too much.
How much? Would I sacrifice even myself to save her, if that’s what it took? I shivered when I thought of her death, and I suspected I would.
So foolish. Yet, I couldn’t help myself. How could I not care for her? So beautiful, so precious, so much mine, and she gave me juice besides.
Foolish me. She gave me juice the same way my territory gave me juice. She was my Focus and my territory, both at once. I was doomed. How could I resist a double dose of Arm instincts? Why would I want to?
I loved her.
Beside me, Lori continued to practice the juice music. She needed to unlearn a decade of bad habits doing seat-of-the-pants witchery, and she progressed slower than she desired. My, though, could Lori turn juice music terminology into four letter words…
Gail and I had indeed provided Lori with a whole shit load of motivation on the subject of juice music, though.
I tried to forget Gail once we got to Keaton’s house. Unfortunately, she snuck in under my defenses when I least expected. Every word, every twist of the juice, reminded me of her. I pushed those thoughts away as best I could. With Lori beside me, here in the lion’s den, any vulnerability was fatal.
Two hours of questioning left McIntyre’s shirt so soaked with sweat it stuck to his back from his neck to his waist. Keaton had him sitting on her ottoman with a figurative ‘for sale’ sign on his forehead that even he could sense. Keaton’s place was at its most horrible today, with someone moaning in agony in her basement even as we talked. Fresh blood odors. Spilled élan as well, from a recent Monster or Chimera death. I picked up on Bass’s odor, but in this miasma of insanity today, I couldn’t metasense anything outside of Keaton’s throne room. I had to repress the urge to lash out whenever her aura grew stronger.
Keaton sat on her throne-like easy chair and Haggerty, Lori and I got to do the full prostration thing on the floor, except that Haggerty couldn’t lay flat with all the metalwork on her leg and so she had one knee on the floor and the bad leg extended out straight, and only her chest and head managed to lay on the floor.
“Two million,” Keaton said.
“He’s mine, ma’am. No.” The last offer had been for a million and a half, but Haggerty showed no sign that she would be willing to sell McIntyre for any price. With Lori and I here to support her, there was no way Keaton could just up and take McIntyre.
A shaved-head Focus came in from the kitchen and knelt to offer Keaton a tray carrying iced tea and a plate of meats and cheeses. She wore nothing but a thin white shift that exposed numerous wounds, a jolting contrast to Lori’s healthy beauty. I recognized Suzanne Morris, the youngest of the first Focuses involved in the organization and execution of the Quarantine breakout, a considerably more important woman than Denise Pitre. She wore Keaton’s tag, but personally, she was weak and fragile, despite her political power among the Firsts and her years of experience shaking useful information out of lobbyists. Keaton certainly hadn’t needed to call me in to help break this one.
In any event, Keaton had promised to get a ruling first Focus for us, for information purposes, and she had delivered. Crazily, I wondered where Keaton got a white shift from. No store I had ever heard of sold white shifts. Keaton must have had it made specifically to humiliate. A part of me responded to that, and heard the call to cruelty of my own. The sane part of me recognized it as lunacy.
Keaton closed her eyes and thought, and when she opened her eyes, to my surprise the lust for McIntyre was gone from them. He no longer existed for her, somehow. That was a hell of a useful trick, one I couldn’t have done, and I damn well wanted and needed it. Apparently, I wasn’t the only Arm doing heavy-duty research and development these days.
“Well,” Keaton said slowly as she leaned back in her chair, “it does sound like it’s about time Shirley Patterson got her comeuppance.” Bass and Rayburn responded to Keaton’s signal and trooped upstairs to lend their weight to the discussion. Both of them reeked of blood and ‘medical experimentation, Arm style’. Bass hadn’t even bothered to rinse her hands. Rayburn? The faint madness in her eyes, her loose walking style reeking of sated lust, and Lori’s mental squeee told me all the story I needed to know. Bass had done the same thing to Rayburn that she did to me, and Patterson took full advantage and completed the process. McIntyre almost fainted when he saw the two of them.
Morris herself gasped and turned pale at Keaton’s comment. Disgusting. Morris was well brok
en. What a waste of a good Focus. Keaton smiled at Morris. “What, you can’t imagine that your precious leader could run into something as mean and nasty as she is? I think that you’re all in for a big surprise.” Keaton smiled wider. “I think I might be able to step into Patterson’s shoes quite nicely.”
I thought of Keaton taking Patterson’s place and my mind boggled. She might be able to defeat Patterson, but there was no way in hell that she could run the Focus organization. Then I realized the truth: Keaton wouldn’t even try. She would delegate the job to me.
Just what I wanted to be, a junior flunky copy of Patterson.
Keaton fixed her gaze on Lori.
“You present me with something of a problem, though if I’d been thinking, I could have predicted this.”
“Ma’am,” Lori said, head bowed, just like an Arm.
“Why aren’t you my prey?” Keaton said, leaning forward, voice harsh.
“Why aren’t the other Arms your prey?” Lori said.
“The other Arms don’t have nice juicy Transforms ripe for the picking.”
“Neither do I.” As polite as Lori was, knives hissed in Lori’s voice. She and Keaton had been sparring for years, almost friends but never quite.
“You dropped Inferno?” Keaton drummed her fingers of her right hand on her easy chair. She showed Lori more tolerance than she ever showed me. Keaton always had. Tolerance for talking and insubordination, at least. I couldn’t remember Lori ever actually talking Keaton out of anything, at least not when I was around.
“No. Just that the Inferno Transforms aren’t ripe for the picking.”
“I could break you, Rizzari. I’ve got the Arms to do it.”
“My tag from Hancock prevents that, the same way Hancock’s tag from me, and her tag from you, prevent me from going after you with charisma or juice patterns. You wanted a handle on the Focuses? Well, here it is, in the flesh. Mutual tagging.”
“That isn’t the solution I wanted, Rizzari. Hancock disobeyed me, taking you.”
“No,” Lori said. “I volunteered.”
“Tell me why.”
Lori paused…and in a moment her aura was pure Lady Death. “You’re offering me freedom from the first Focuses. Polly can’t, and neither can Tonya.”
Keaton leaned back and thought. “Where’s Sky in this? Why don’t I see his tag on the two of you?”
“He’s a male Major Transform,” Lori said. “And you never trained him, unlike myself.”
“You’re looking for my permission?”
“Yes, ma’am, if you’re offering,” Lori said.
“Why?”
“We’re in a fight against the first Focuses, ma’am, and you’re the supreme leader. Until the fight is over, my instincts say the decision is your call.”
“Cheeky as always, Rizzari. What about the other witches? Any other volunteers?”
“Not as of yet,” Lori said. “However, if I walk away from this meeting no worse than when I walked in, they’ve indicated a willingness to at least talk to me about alliance issues.” Lori and I could enlist Gail simply by offering a place on the Adkins takedown. Tonya’s participation in Schrum’s demise, Polly’s in Patterson’s destruction, and Connie Webb’s in Fingleman’s fall would barely cost more. Lori and I agreed, though, that we weren’t going to offer any such thing to Keaton for free.
Keaton thought again, and looked at Bass. “Break her,” Bass said. “Wipe her fake obedient expression off her face.”
Lori looked up with Lady Death eyes and shot Bass a single quick glance. One impolitic twitch and Bass’s brains would decorate the floor. Hell, if Lady Death decided she no longer cared about preserving her life, nobody in this house would survive. Bass didn’t respect Lori’s power, but Keaton sure did.
“Why should I destroy someone who’s volunteering to fight for me?” Keaton said.
“Will she fight? Against Focuses?” Bass said, a slight catch in her voice. She had seen Lady Death’s glance.
Keaton’s answer was one word. “Schrum.”
Both Bass and Rayburn quailed when they saw kill lust in all three of us, Haggerty, Lori and myself.
“Under Arm rule, Rizzari, we’ll demand the right to take any Transform from any Focus household we deem appropriate. You have a problem with that?”
“What if the household itself is strong enough to thwart the Arm? Or is the philosophy of might makes right valid only for the Arms?”
“Kill her now!” Bass said, in a sudden panic. “She’s rolling us! Tricking us! Infecting us with her corrupt ideas!” There was nothing worse to a bully than prey who fought back. Her voice echoed with the moral umbrage of the racist against a civil rights leader, the anti-Semite conspiracy theorist against a Jewish professional, and men of power against any woman with the guts to succeed in the world of business or politics. Bass wanted to be an unconstrained predator, but she wanted her prey constrained not to fight back. To me, that made her no predator at all.
Lucky for us, Keaton didn’t have this particular twist in her aberrant mind.
“She isn’t rolling us,” Keaton said. “I can feel her tag through Hancock’s tag, and my predator and my tag to Hancock makes me Lori’s boss. For once. No, Rizzari has a valid point. Nor do I have any answers on the subject.” Keaton paused, and turned to Rayburn, and then Bass. Neither said anything, and unresolved tension covered the room. After a half minute, Keaton turned back to Lori. “We’re going to speak again on this subject, Rizzari. Later. Say, after the first Focuses fall and the Focuses are mine. No tag with Sky until after our negotiation. Either of you. I’m not in a trusting mood regarding Crows. Spend some time thinking about what you or any other Focus who’s joined the Arms voluntarily are going to be tithing to us. I will be expecting an exceptional offer, because otherwise, I suspect I’ll soon possess all the blackmail material I need to enforce my desires.”
“Ma’am,” Lori said. “I will think on the subject, as you desire.” Her fists clenched and unclenched in anger, but she didn’t say anything further.
“Hancock,” Keaton said.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“You’re my number two again, or do you and Bass need to go to Nevada?”
I looked at Bass and she glared back. Stature wise, I matched Keaton now. Bass’s crazy games gave her success in other areas, but she still lacked stature, and I was beginning to think stature might be the most important component in Arm dominance. Giselle’s abnormal stature, entirely from Focuses, supported my theory, and, no, I wasn’t going to even mention Giselle in front of Keaton. She was yet another surprise weapon of mine, waiting for the day.
I didn’t avert my gaze from Bass. I would take Keaton’s offer and destroy Bass, if Keaton let me. I even wore my combat boots with the platinum inserts.
Bass bowed to me, giving me rank. Crap. I hoped the gesture burned in her blood.
“Okay,” Keaton said, eyeing the both of us. Nope, no trips to Nevada. “You prepared to take down some Focuses?”
“Yes, ma’am.” I had studied the Focuses assigned to me and no longer had any qualms about the operation.
“Good. Then pay attention. I want to do some legwork first, so let’s give it a few days. On Tuesday night – no, Wednesday morning, December 20th, at three in the morning eastern time, that’s when you make your attack. Take those Focuses down and take them down hard. Can you do that?”
“Absolutely, ma’am.” I don’t know what changed Keaton’s mind, likely my overwhelming takedown of Haggerty, but she had conformed to my insistence that we hit the leaders of the first Focuses simultaneously. Save for the fact I would have gone after Patterson first, not bozos like Morris, the mistake level was dropping by the hour.
“Good. I want daily reports at a minimum. Don’t fuck this up. Feel free to reel in any of the other witches but Biggioni to our cause, under your command. If Biggioni volunteers,” lust, “send her to me.”
“No, ma’am, yes ma’am,” I said, so carefully obedient. �
��Ma’am…”
She stared at me, and I stared back. I had a verbal report prepared on the missing baby Arms and the Chrysanthemum connection (and from this, my fear that Fingleman had a baby Arm bodyguard detail), Patterson’s ability to infiltrate my mind (and the when and the how), and how to fight off Patterson’s influence. I gave a spoken synopsis of the report in my mind, letting Keaton read it in me, and offering to give the report aloud. I felt this was critical to our chance of success, but even I wouldn’t have tolerated a subordinate bringing this up on her own. Keaton would need to ask.
She didn’t.
I changed what I was going to say. “Ma’am, I need to let you know that Gail Rickenbach gave me juice before I left Chicago.”
Keaton blinked, as this wasn’t what I showed her in my mind. Lucky for me, she was used to me playing this game with her, always with good news, never bad. “Repeatable?”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said.
“Using Hank’s codified juice pattern system?”
“Yes, ma’am.” Neither of us needed to say ‘thus proving Hank’s codified juice pattern project is a success.’ We both understood the significance of this proof.
Bass sucked air in response and Rayburn whistled. Three months earlier Keaton might have done to Bass what she had done to me after learning this. She still might, as this was the breakthrough she had set me out to find back when I was magical-thinking Carol and wearing hippie garb. If she wanted details, I had them. If she wanted science, I had a scientist with me, Lori, to explain everything. If she wanted analysis, I had Haggerty, our best analyst, primed and ready to talk.
Nothing. Just the great stone face. Today I could see through it, though, with the weight of two households behind me. Keaton was angry.
I hadn’t expected anger…unless she thought I hadn’t been putting my full effort into her orders regarding the first Focus attacks and Network subversion, thus cheating her out of my time. “Hank, Gail and Gilgamesh did all the work, ma’am. The only thing I did was lay back and receive juice.”
The Forgefires of God (The Cause Book 3) Page 8
