Beasts Ascendant: The Chronicles of the Cause, Parts One and Two

by Randall Farmer

  She found the background beeping of a heart monitor machine ominous.

  “Gail, you back with us?” Gilgamesh said. He rose up to rest on his elbow, exposing a handsome, hairless, and moderately muscular chest. She answered with a grunt and turned her head to see all sorts of hospital equipment around her bed. “Everyone’s been worried about you. And calling me Gailgamesh, trying to convince me to figure out, as a ‘miracle working Crow Guru’, how to move juice like a Focus.”

  She had told Sylvie never to use her ‘Gailgamesh’ jape again, though most of the time her household president used it to refer to her. She dropped her head back down onto her pillow. “I did something bad, didn’t I?” It was the only thing that made sense.

  “Uh huh. Something that left you with dross poisoning and élan production. What did you do, anyway?”

  “I’m not sure,” Gail said. The dross poisoning and élan production comment explained her current lack of metasense range. She metasense scanned herself, and found no dross, no sign she had ever been wounded, and little juice left in her juice buffer. “I got shot. Shit! How’s my baby!”

  “Your unborn child is doing fine.”

  “How long?”

  “Four days.”

  Four days, and if her metasense scans were correct, four days without doing any juice moving. “I would say that panicky pregnant witches with juice buffer access might tend to overdo things a little,” Gail said.

  “Uh huh. It was quite enlightening to listen to the Good Doctor attempting to find the wounds. Less than four hours after. And later. I’m not sure he ever figured out where the second shot hit.”

  “It shredded my subclavian artery,” she said. “The normal fix requires stopping my heart, which I couldn’t do, because of the baby, so I got creative.”

  “I think you got a bit too creative,” Gilgamesh said. “Your ribs were growing in width when I got to you, and you were well on your way to being a Focus-Monster inside a turtle shell.”

  “Ouch!” A problem already fixed, though. “I need to get up.”

  “Slowly,” Gilgamesh said. Gail sat up, slowly, to the tune of an increasingly urgent beep beep of the heart monitor, and examined the IV and catheter lines. Yum.

  “My people need me to go back to being their Focus, and, well, the dross poisoning did its thing and I can’t metasense worth squat.” From previous oopses during her early household tuning work with Gilgamesh, she predicted her metasense would recover in a few days.

  The world swam around her as she sat. She carefully directed a bit of healing to her middle ear area, less than a tenth of a point of juice. The dizziness went away – and she winced at the pain as her hearing acuity went ballistic. She hadn’t even heard the shrieking of prepubescent girls at the pool before she fixed her ear.

  “See,” Gilgamesh said.

  “Slowly. Got it.”

  “There you go,” Focus Rachel Hanneman said, handing Gail a well-wrapped box. “Just the thing to fortify a Focus stuck in a wheelchair.” Rachel lowered her voice. “The secret ingredient is a half teaspoon of coffee grounds.”

  A fruitcake. A Focus was giving her a fruitcake. “Thank you!” Gail said, one of her more accomplished lies. All her student Focuses had been dropping off gifts, though none sunk as low as fruitcakes, before Rachel. “I heard Gloria’s been helping you out with the basics. How’s that going?” Rachel was Gail’s newest, sent here by Focus Hocutt. Gail had only gotten one day with Rachel before St. Louis.

  “Notes are confusing,” Rachel said. “I’m having a real hard time producing just one. Or the same one twice in a row.”

  “It takes time and practice.” For some Focuses, at least.

  “So, where’s Van?” Gail asked. Sylvie wheeled Gail around the Branton, and Gail was still not over the embarrassment of having to move juice by hand like a bottom quartile Focus. Right now they crossed the busy lobby, in the middle of the morning rush, as various household members ate breakfast and headed out to work. Trisha paused on the way by and briefly lowered her head. Gail obligingly put her hand on Trisha’s forehead, dodging the bouffant bottle blonde hair, and charged her up for the day. Gail tried not to grimace as Trisha hustled off again.

  “He’s been through several times, mostly with Hank,” Sylvie said. She sighed. “Connie’s got Hank covered by an Inferno bodyguard detail of two, as well as at least two normals with him who can resist juice and dross illusions.”

  “So Connie’s taking the threat of the man seriously?” Gail asked. “Is she or Zielinski making any progress on finding him?”

  “Uh, no,” Sylvie said. “They’re both working on household superorganism stuff. Blood tests. Wild ideas by the thousands. Zielinski’s roped Van and Daisy into this, as well as Ann Chiron and Dr. Rogers.” Dr. Ophelia Rogers, of Inferno, was a shady quack, in Gail’s opinion, worse than even Zielinski. She wouldn’t trust the former plastic surgeon with a stethoscope.

  “Zielinski’s letting Dr. Rogers help him with his research? I’d say his standards have dropped to an all-time low.”

  Sylvie snorted and wheeled Gail into her office. “There’s something about a bout of Transform training Dr. Rogers went through, under Lori, just after Inferno arrived here. Dr. Rogers recently recovered, and in Hank’s opinion, she got an extra twenty points of IQ from the training.” Typical Lori impossible stuff. Not worth worrying about.

  Focus Gerry Caruthers stood at Gail’s corkboard map of the United States, smiling. Gerry had added, in the Hawaii corner of the map, a nicely painted-in map of Chicago. “Good morning, Gerry,” Gail said. “Is the Chicago map yours?”

  “Nope,” she said. “Rita’s.”

  “Focus Cagle’s back?”

  Gerry nodded. “Something about not being able to resist a Focus hero, I believe.”

  “Focus hero?” Gail said, groaning. “Being shot doesn’t make you a hero, it makes you a victim.” Utter silliness.

  “Yes, Arm Rickenbach.”

  Sylvie giggled.

  Gail shrugged. She was getting tired of being in a wheelchair, but given that she fell over the last two times she tried to get out of it, the wheelchair would be hers until she got farther along in her recovery. “There are parts of your body and mind the juice will heal much better on its own without you directing it, ma’am,” Zielinski had said, in explanation. She hadn’t realized the limitation would ever apply to her.

  “Okay, perhaps I did spend too much time being trained by an Arm,” Gail said. She smiled a pointed smile at Gerry. “Something you’ll likely figure out far too soon.”

  “Probably,” Gerry said, wincing. “Anyway, Gail, I decided that you didn’t need another fruitcake, so I made you this.” Rachel’s fruitcake had already become legend among Gail’s students, what she thought of as instinctive point-making by the Focuses.

  “What’s ‘this’?” Gail asked. Gerry frowned. “One of your juice objects?” Gail looked around her office, not spotting the obvious. “You’re going to need to tell me. The healing oops that landed me in the wheelchair did a number on my metasense.”

  “Oh, that’s what’s different,” Gerry said. “I tricked up your corkboard to interact with the Dreaming…and you. It will display what you know once you tag it.”

  “Neat!” Gail said. She wheeled herself over to the corkboard, put a finger on it, and felt its juice. She felt more than a little disquieted by Gerry’s gift, the same level of disquiet she felt whenever Gilgamesh gave her one of his new toys. The object oriented Focuses and Crows created such intricate and impossible juice patterns and dross constructs. She understood why the paranoid first Focuses tried to ban this technology. “What does this do?”

  “Give it a moment.”

  Little illusions popped up on the corkboard, little multi-colored dots and symbols. “For instance, this symbol here refers to a Hunter pack sighting. You can, with your tag, control how recent the symbols will show, or in what detail…”

  Gail smiled. She couldn’t wait to g
et back on her feet and use this toy.

  “So, Lady Gail, my present for you is a story,” Dowling said. After the celebratory ‘our Focus is back!’ lunch with Abyss and Inferno, Gail allowed Dowling and Ellen to drag her off to the Branton’s honeymoon suite. Gail had, just before lunch, gotten to listen to Van apologize for not being there when she woke up today as well as prattle on about how they were getting close to time to experiment with tagging her, ‘they’ being the Inferno household. Gail didn’t lose her temper. Barely.

  “A story?” Gail said. Fred and Ellen had cleaned up the honeymoon suite for her visit, but nothing could hide the homey odor of ample Major Transform sex. From the emotionally sated state of Crow Master Zero, who lounged in a chair by the television, Gail highly suspected the Crow and Ellen were now ‘close friends’.

  “The one you wanted me to tell, earlier, about my little adventure a couple of months ago,” Dowling said. He sat on the end of the oversized honeymoon suite bed and smiled. “You ought to be glad that you hooked me up with Ellen; wounded Focuses do something awful to a Noble’s emotions and I doubt I would have had enough sense to stop from getting crazy.”

  Ellen gave Dowling a hard look. She had been standing stern and distant, but after he spoke she came over and sat down next to him. “Focus heroes especially,” Ellen said. “It does the same thing to us Focuses.”

  I’m not a hero! This time Gail didn’t say a word. “And associated households,” Gail did say. “I didn’t realize Inferno would get the weepies over a wounded Focus. I think it’s changed how they think of me.” She hadn’t been able to stop an Inferno squad from going out to investigate the shooting. She feared the man, as did Sylvie. The Inferno squad, though, fingered the St. Louis branch of the Original Declaration Nativists, a group of radical right wing crazies who believed the Declaration of Independence held legal authority over the Constitution. Inferno was still investigating, worried that someone might be using the ODN as patsies.

  “It’s changed how everyone thinks of you, Gail, or should I say Director,” Ellen said. “You should see the press you’re getting.” Sylvie had already invited in two photographers, one from UPI, to assure the breathless public that the exemplary and heroic Focus Rickenbach was still alive. They, too, now called her ‘the Director’.

  “The story?” Gail said. Anything to distract her from her heroic ‘adventure’.

  ---

  “Her name is Monica Williams,” Ann Chiron said. “She was kidnapped two days ago by unknown assailants, believed to be a Hunter and his pack, from the household of Focus Allison Silvey. She had been on her way to work when she was kidnapped. Focus Rizzari believes that the kidnapped Transform woman remains in the greater Cleveland area.”

  “Thank you,” Count Dowling said. He had recognized the danger while meditating on a patch of worrisome cirrus clouds last night, and after leaving the Blue Ridge Barony with his team, he rattled some cages and found an Inferno troubleshooting team already on the case. They met in Veteran’s Park in Sandusky, Ohio, an open area of brick pavement in the shadow of the Erie County courthouse. He resisted the urge to sit on the monument to Sandusky’s war dead and turned to the one member of the Inferno crew he didn’t recognize. “My name is Count Frederick Dowling,” he said, to the young woman. “You are?”

  “Margot Lassiter, your grace,” she said, giving him a curtsey with an imaginary skirt, an incongruous thing for a young woman bodybuilder in blue jeans. “I’m here as part of my training.”

  “Welcome to the club,” Dowling said. He had even heard of Deadly Margot from some of the other Inferno teens. “I expect great things from you, as with anyone from Inferno, but as I always say: don’t be afraid to hide behind me if things get hairy. Even in my man-form, I’m a lot harder to kill than you are.” Or will ever be.

  She nodded and winked at him. Sizing him up, perhaps, for some bedtime fun. He would need to ask Ann if she was of legal age first, though. Far too many of the Inferno teens were, um, dangerously precocious.

  After four hours of searching Crow Master Zero found the Transform, partly hidden under an inexpertly created élan shield, on Lake Erie’s Ruggles Beach. After a short discussion, they decided the enemies’ Crows, if any, already realized they were in the area, so the Inferno team drove to the beach as opposed to going on foot. Given the weather – low 40s, rain showers, stiff wind off the lake – any excuse to not go in on foot was good.

  “Something’s not right, here,” Ann said, huddling under her rain poncho. “We’re downwind of something foul.” The team unloaded from their cars into the parking lot of the old Ruggles Inn, currently closed for the season.

  “Old élan,” Dowling said. He actually appreciated the cool weather and brisk wind, but he doubted his enthusiasm would be well received among the Inferno people. They seemed decidedly cranky about it. “An old Monster, perhaps out in the lake. The young Hunter is hiding under a puked-up élan mess, along with the Monster ladies of his pack. Three or four, I can’t tell.”

  “It’s four, your grace,” Master Zero said.

  “Isn’t that a bit small for a pack?”

  “The rest he’s probably stashed elsewhere. Given he’s an unproven Hunter, the rest of his pack likely aren’t combat capable.” Dowling also suspected, as with all young Hunters, he went through pack ladies like potato chips.

  They crept over to the beach; there were no dunes here, just beach houses a long way back from the beach, and a rocky and gravel-infested public beach in front of them, shaded by trees less than a dozen yards from the water. Waves whipped the shore, and the gritty sand, not pretty in the best of circumstances, looked dark with damp. The nighttime rain gave excellent cover, as well as the Hunter’s stupidity of caching his captive here so any fool could approach from downwind.

  “Ten bucks says this is a trap,” Ann said.

  “Because of how stupid this setup is?”

  “Uh huh.”

  “Movement on the beach,” Deadly Margot said. Dowling motioned for everyone to lie flat, and he crept forward to see what was moving.

  The person moving was a woman. She was chained to a picnic table, under what would have been a shade tree in the summer, but wasn’t, now. She was gagged but not bound save by the chain, attached to her right leg by a shackle and a bike lock. All were heavy enough to be part of a Hunter’s standard kit for pack lady confinement. She wasn’t dressed for the weather. He carefully crept back to the Inferno team.

  “She’s the Transform?” Dowling said. All he could metasense was a cloud of élan covering the entire picnic table area.

  “Yes, and she’s going to be a mess,” Master Zero said. Ann motioned for the Inferno people to huddle up around Master Zero.

  “The Hunter’s right there,” she said, pointing. Dowling looked out onto the choppy darkness of the lake and whistled, as quiet a whistle as he could manage. The Hunter was in the water! His shape was vaguely familiar, that of a crab, another Chimera who, like Duke Hoskins, had transformed too near the seacoast or a river. “He’s in his combat form, which I’m pretty sure is a crab.”

  Chiron possessed excellent eyes for a Transform, and he suspected she cheated, given the number of juice patterns she carried, all the benefit of Focus Queen Rizzari.

  “Why shouldn’t we charge?” Dowling said. That is: what’s the real trap?

  “Besides never doing what the enemy wants you to do?” Ann said. She lay beside him on the sandy pine needles and whispered in his ear. “I’ll bet he has a way to kill the bait before we get to her.”

  “I mean, charge the Hunter,” Dowling said. “Can you and your people handle three pack Monsters?”

  Ann patted her canister-fed RPG rifle. “This and the .707s my people are carrying say so.”

  Dowling worked out the angles and moved everyone fifty yards to the right and twenty forward, so when they charged they could fire at the pack Monsters without endangering the captive.

  They charged.

  The pack
Monsters didn’t do what Dowling expected. Instead of offering to fight, they dove into the water; Dowling suspected they were mer-Monsters. The young Hunter backed away and howled Terror, but not aimed at them. His was almost a seductive Terror roar.

  Dowling motioned with his left arm and pointed at the captive. Ann went prone and started to fire at the Hunter, as did Antonio and Dale. The others crept over to the captive. Dowling continued his charge.

  The real problem stuck its head out of the water and struck at Dowling, faster than he could grind to a stop.

  He carried a modified grenade launcher, one meant for fixed location use, but modified by Inferno for someone of his size and strength. One round only, unless he reloaded, which he wouldn’t. The round went into the creature’s mouth and exploded.

  Teeth and flesh flew, but the Monster didn’t die. The Monster’s bite took a bit of Dowling’s left leg, his entire left foot, and a lot more of beach sand and rock.

  He had never seen anything like her. The Monster stank of sewers and decay; her physical form was that of a forty foot long armored snake, but snakes didn’t have gills or mouths filled with dozens of teeth, so he decided she was actually an eel-Monster. Her scales were moss covered, barnacle covered, discolored, and ugly. The creature didn’t show up in Dowling’s metasense until he blew a hole in her mouth. Now she metasensed as all the élan in the world, with more élan than the oldest Monster Dowling had ever before encountered.

  “Hold fire on the Monster,” Ann shouted.

  “What? No!” Dowling said, as he ducked under the Monster’s neck and spun toward the young Hunter, his sword out and the grenade launcher long gone. The Hunter had summoned up the creature, something Dowling wanted to disrupt.

  “Fire on the Hunter,” Ann said.