Love and Darkness (The Cause Book 2)

by Randall Farmer

  I stopped, frozen on the third to last step, when I realized the intruder was not only masked from my metasense, but also invisible. Not invisible to Walter, though. Poor Walter, so successful at being a predator. He worked at an insane asylum, and he liked to indulge in a little torture on the side. A lot of torture, actually. For a normal, he knew his stuff. Walter knew enough to hit his helpless victims right where they were weakest, and he carefully and slowly would drive them farther and farther into mind-broken insanity.

  So, what did Walter see? I took to the ceiling, spider style, and scuttled along while studying Walter with all my capabilities. I knew Walter enough to be able to read his mind like the proverbial open book.

  Walter saw Death in its popular conception: skeletal, black cloaked, the scythe, the works. I made my guess and dropped to the floor, giving up any pretense of stealth.

  “Lori. What the fuck are you doing here?”

  No answer. Had I guessed wrong? I assumed the worst and advanced at Arm speed, using my new combat tricks and burning juice as I approached. I located my target based on where Walter saw Death and attempted a body grab and toss.

  I grabbed nothing but air. No surprise, unfortunately; the concepts behind my new combat method were my take on Lori’s standard combat tricks. If we both went after each other this way, we might not hit each other even once during the fight.

  “Talk to me, Lori,” I said.

  “Why?”

  Lori’s voice, but from everywhere. She had me. I couldn’t tell where her charisma effects stopped and her witch effects started. Her next step? Take me, break me, and get me to lead her to Keaton at a time when Keaton’s Arm entourage wasn’t protecting her. Lori would successfully surprise Keaton, and Keaton wouldn’t walk out of the encounter alive. Whether Lori walked out of the encounter alive or not was a big question, but I understood her strategy. One Focus, albeit a physically powerful one, was a worthy sacrifice to the Cause if she took Keaton down with her.

  However, this idiocy was not why I ‘invited’ Lori to Chicago. She was supposed to defeat me and find a way to rip me out of my darkness. I refused to let a Focus I loved take the hits that should be mine to absorb.

  “Dammit, Lori, you were supposed to think of a way to get us out of this mess, not make it worse.” Instead, she came up with this. Crap.

  “Getting us out of this mess is your job, Commander,” Lori said. “Come up with something better than my idea.”

  I sat down on the blood-dampened floor and gave up on any pretense of self-defense. Lori had me if she wanted, and, truthfully, getting her to take me down was why I wanted her in Chicago.

  “What’s your idea, Lori?”

  “My idea is to join you and Keaton,” Lori said. I heard lust in her voice.

  No! I buried my head in my hands. The Focus I loved had gone around the bend. “If this is some sort of half-assed attempt to send me on a guilt trip, it’s not going to work.”

  “I told you long ago that Suzie Schrum was mine to kill,” she said. “That’s one. Keaton knows enough about Focus psychology to know her plan won’t work. That’s two.”

  Damn. Lori was serious. My beast had seduced her back into full Lady Death mode. I felt the repressed ache in my loins again, growing, growing. The beast inside thought Lori’s idea was wonderful.

  “If the Arms start to poach Transforms, no blackmail imaginable is going to work on the Focuses, and there goes Keaton’s political power over them,” Lori said. “That’s standard Focus psychology: the lives of their Transforms come first. Keaton understands this, so I’m guessing she’s got something else in mind.”

  She gave Keaton more credit for logical thought than I did. “Besides Schrum, what do you get out of this? You and the witches, that is.”

  Lori laughed. She became visible, finally. Blood soaked the hem of her black cloak. I wasn’t sure whether the image was real or illusion. “The other witches told me to go to Chicago and work miracles with Gail. Ordered me to stick my head in the noose. I warned them they might regret sending me here. They didn’t listen, or, in Polly’s case, wanted this. Tonya and Connie even thought I might talk you into breaking with Keaton. They didn’t listen to me when I hinted that I thought Keaton’s plan was better than the plan we were working with. Commander.”

  Damn. Keaton’s plan did have the advantage of being faster, and Lori’s personal visualization of the Cause always led her to be the most time conscious of us all.

  “Keaton’s way lies anarchy. The collapse of civilization.”

  “Nothing either you or I or anyone else has come up with leads anywhere else.”

  “Inferno disagrees.” Inferno’s idea, an armed assault on Keaton, also led to anarchy. In my opinion.

  “My esteemed colleagues are stalling for a miracle. So am I, but I think the miracle is more likely under a Keaton world dictatorship than with a dead Keaton.”

  Ah. Keaton this, Keaton that, but no mention of Keaton’s current strategist. “And if in the process you goad Bass into trying for you or one of your Transforms, you’re convinced there’ll be one less Bass in the world.” One less Bass, and leaving Lori close to Keaton, to influence the boss Arm away from Bass’s idiocy. I began to see the possibilities of Lori’s plan.

  “I didn’t mention her,” Lori said. “You did.” Standard Major Transform doublethink. Don’t leave home without it. “Don’t forget, Commander, that you’re the one who bridled and nurtured my darkness. I don’t have the urge to torture innocents, or even flawed humans like Frank and Davie who just deserve death, but, well, you saw what I was doing with Walter. Eternal torment is too good for ones such as him. Keaton’s path is seductive. I feel the call deep inside me. Arms aren’t the only ones who want more freedom of action.”

  Lori, or the illusion of Lori, put her hands on my shoulders. Her power washed through me, her anger and her need to ‘just do something’. “I lost my job, my career and my position as leader of the likely-dead Cause. I can’t be in the same room as the Eskimo Spear anymore, and I can barely find anyone in the Dreaming. I’m pathetic at Hank’s new codified juice crap and Inferno’s ready to lock me in a closet and make me a Weak Focus household’s Weak Focus for real. All Sky and I ever do any more is argue, the Crow I truly love is stuck with my student, and there’s something about Rickenbach and Hargrove in the same room together, and gossiping, that makes me want to pull my hair out.” She paused. “So, Commander, which way shall we go? Tell me you have a better idea than mine.”

  I laughed. Lori’s idea about joining me was far better than anything I had come up with. “Let’s say you agree to join me. Then what?”

  “We tag each other. We can’t trust each other without mutual tags in a situation so ripe with betrayal opportunities. I’ve seen how well your mutual tag with Gail works. We can save you tagging Inferno for later, for instance, if you need an instant army for some reason or other.”

  “Keaton’s going to destroy us if we tag each other. My hierarchy is already too big a threat for her to cope with.”

  “Let her try. What can she do? If Keaton tries the multi-Arm predator effect on me, she needs to untag you first.”

  “Similarly, you can’t go after Keaton if you’re tagged by me.”

  Lori knelt beside me, reeking of blood and the sweet odor of lust. No, in no way did I want to fight Lori, not with her own beast awakened. I wanted to, lusted to, wreak havoc on the world with Lori at my side. “Carol, as long as Keaton’s plan works, it’s the right plan. Keaton will need to confront reality if she wants to preserve her ‘Arm freedom of action’ idea. If her current advisor disagrees? Well, we’ve seen how quickly Keaton can turn on her advisors.”

  Lori was right about the last. “And what if Keaton doesn’t succeed?”

  “I’ll help you pick up the pieces.”

  Right. This was a manipulative Focus talking, no doubt about that. “What about Sky? What about your baby?”

  “Sky? Sky’s darkness is as bad as ours i
s, but we can’t bring him in with us until we grab Inferno, because he’s gone to ground inside the household. He’s there if and when we need him, though. The baby? Well, we’re past the first trimester, and…”

  “And what?”

  “Dead is dead, Carol. The method isn’t important,” Lori said. I heard the struggle inside her between her words. She wasn’t totally sold on her own plan, but she would follow my lead and trust in my love. Dammit! She had fallen in love with me long ago, seduced by my darkness. I never had to awaken her beast; when Keaton and I broke her and remade her as Lady Death it wasn’t to awaken her beast, but to help her find a way to leash her beast and keep her from wildly careening from guilt to triumph and back. Her beast had always been lying in wait for my beast to re-emerge and lead her over the edge. She would never pull me back into the light. She was the one who joined me in the darkness, and would remain there beside me through whatever black realms we traveled.

  For a moment I remembered Lori was a Focus, someone who should be preserving life, not taking it. In that moment, if I could have gotten away with it, I would have knocked Lori out, tossed her back to Inferno, and told them to take better care of their Focus.

  The moment passed, and Lori was far too powerful for a cheap trick like that to work, anyway.

  I should have understood, long ago, why I never needed to excise the dark parts of my mind to love Lori. My beast loved Lori because the dark parts of our minds had always been soul mates.

  “This path at least leaves me in control of my own destiny,” Lori said. “I could never just sit passively in Boston, waiting for some idiot Arm to come by and get herself killed while harassing my household. Even if her death would trigger the real Focus-Arm war.” Lori paused. “Besides, once we tag each other, there’s something the two of us need to do that we’ve been avoiding for far too long.”

  I nodded and slowly raised my hand to her cheek. “I missed you,” I said. Her juice shivered at my touch, and I left my hand on her cheek as her juice and my juice nudged back and forth between us, electric fire.

  She nodded. “We both chose the hard path a long time ago. I love you for it. I always have.” She raised my hand to her lips and kissed the tip of each finger in turn. “I wish this didn’t hurt so much.”

  “If we didn’t suffer so much pain, we wouldn’t have grown so strong.” Her dark hair straggled across her forehead, damp with sweat and a few drops of blood. I carefully pushed her hair back into place. Our eyes met, and for a moment her eyes became my world, just like the old days, when we first met.

  “I’m tired of pain,” she said, breathing hotly on my fingers. “I want a few hours where the pain isn’t mine for a change.”

  “I can oblige,” I said softly, and smiled. So beautiful. So mine. I rose to my knees and touched Walter gently, let him twitch as I covered my hand in his blood. I stroked my bloody fingers across my love’s pale cheek, streaking it with red. Then the other, matching marks, equipping her for war. She touched her cheek and took my hand. Smiled. She raised my bloody hand up to her mouth and slowly licked the length of my index finger.

  I chuckled, low and deep in my chest, and slowly undid the clasp of her black cloak. Pushed it off her shoulders to the floor. I started on the buttons of her blouse and her breath caught.

  She raised her hand up to me, but the blood on it was old and cracked, so she put it down on Walter’s wounds. This time he screamed. When she raised it from him, blood dripped in runnels down her arm. She traced a bloody path from my mouth, down my neck to between my breasts. She smiled, long and slow and cayenne pepper hot.

  Darkness grew.

  Tonya Biggioni: November 25, 1972

  Delia opened the door to Tonya’s office and poked her head in. “Rizzari on line two,” she said.

  Tonya hesitated a moment and shook her head. She had just finished a long conversation with Pearl Innkeep, convincing her to move her household to New York for the interim. Polly gathered up as many Focuses as she could, checking them out to see how willing they would be to commit their lives, offering her secrets as bait. Pearl had been balky, not because she wouldn’t pledge her life and household to the Cause, but because she didn’t want to move. Pearl had operated alone, with such minimal support, for so long that she couldn’t understand her danger. Before Pearl, Tonya had been chatting with Maybelle Roznovsky, a graduate of Lori’s witch program, one of the young witches Polly wanted brought in. Her problem had been money and political worries; their money was so tight they couldn’t swing the short move from Scranton to Polly’s place on Long Island, and Maybelle worried about Focus Collins’ disappearance. Tonya had arranged a loan for Maybelle from her own household fund. She couldn’t say much about Focus Collins’ disappearance; Tonya feared Collins had gotten caught in Focus Teas’ current feud with Focus Schrum, decided to go gypsy and had fled to the West Region.

  Now Tonya needed to talk to Lori, a task requiring complete calm. The putative head of the Cause took her Chicago move and her help to Gail and Zielinski more seriously than Tonya liked. Lori treated the move as permanent.

  “Lori! So good to hear from you! Did you have a fine Thanksgiving?”

  “Hello, Tonya.”

  Lori’s voice sent a shiver up Tonya’s spine. “What’s up?”

  “Tell Polly I’m joining the Commander.”

  For a moment, Tonya’s voice caught in her throat. Surely she had misheard Lori. “What?”

  “Keaton’s a much better choice for boss than the first Focuses. Unless Keaton goes after Polly’s witches, I’m in. I’d strongly advise you to consider following my lead.”

  So much for calmness. Lori had changed sides. Dammit!

  “You’re crazy.”

  “We’re all crazy, Tonya. Tell me that breaking Transforms and gathering blackmail materials on new Focuses so we control them instead of the first Focuses isn’t crazy.”

  “What? You haven’t complained about my breaking Transforms for years.”

  “I’m not complaining,” Lori said. “I’m just trying to point out the fact that you aren’t a saintly paragon of virtue and sanity. There’s a lot to be said regarding taking our destiny in our own hands. It’s called freedom. How much easier would life be if we just ignored the oppressive government and chose our Transforms ourselves?”

  Tonya almost dropped the phone in appalled shock. “Keaton’s way involves institutionalized violence! You’ll drive yourself insane! You’ll drive all the Focuses insane.”

  “Tonya, we’re already insane, and nothing you or I do will change the fact. Focuses are tough. Don’t forget the deeper plan: if the Arms refuse to negotiate, the worst that can happen is exactly what you and Polly are leading us to – a war against the Arms.”

  Lori-land with a vengeance. “You and Carol tagged each other, didn’t you?”

  “Yes. Witnessed by a few trusted Inferno members and Carol’s entourage.”

  “How many people did you kill?” Tonya said. She understood what darkness looked like when the Arms went wild.

  “In a tagging ceremony? That’s no place for death.” Lori laughed. “No, we hunted as part of our celebration, later. We’re making Chicago a much safer city.”

  Tonya wanted to vomit. “Lori!”

  “No innocents. Carol doesn’t prey on the weak and innocent. Even Bass can’t order Carol to do so.”

  “Keaton will, just to prove she can.” Dominance.

  “Trade-offs, Tonya. If Keaton pushes Carol too far, Carol will drop Keaton’s tag. Remember, that’s what you want.”

  God. I get my way, and split the Arms, but only if Carol balks at killing innocents, Tonya thought. Utterly insane. What am I supposed to do to further my faction, convince Keaton to order Carol to massacre a pre-school?

  “You’re helping Carol hunt, aren’t you.”

  Lori snorted. “She doesn’t need me to help her hunt Transforms. Psychopaths, though. Carol’s good at reading people, but psychopaths fool her techniques. As a wi
tch, I’m not fooled. We’ve been having all sorts of fun.”

  “What is this going to do to you, Lori? Do you care?”

  “Ask Polly. She practically ordered me to drench myself in blood.”

  Tonya bit down on the shriek trying to bubble its way up from her chest. “Wait! Carol is fooled by psychopaths? Her Nibs is a psychopath, remember.”

  “Carol knows the danger. You know I can’t say much on the subject, but I can at least pass along the information that your earlier surmise, that Keaton would be handling that particular problem, is correct. Join us, Tonya. It’s the right thing to do, and I’m convinced Keaton’s going to need help, your variety of help.”

  Shit. “I’ll talk to Polly.”

  “Do that.” Lori hung up.

  ---

  “Polly,” Tonya said. Another phone call.

  “Yes?”

  “Lori’s joined Carol. They tagged each other.”

  “Great!”

  “Are you crazy? Do you think we should join…”

  “Not yet, Tonya. Calm down. What’s Lori’s position about us?”

  Tonya took a deep breath. “Lori says that she’s with Carol unless Keaton goes after the witches. Lori also says you planned this.”

  “In a way,” Polly said. “I’m gambling that with Lori by her side, Carol will be willing to break with Keaton if she’s ordered to go after us.”

  “If you lose that gamble, we’re screwed. Lady Death is nothing to sneer at, and I for one would not want to face Lori.”

  “Tonya, don’t forget, Lori’s my apprentice witch,” Polly said. “If she’s a problem, you would be shocked how fast I can take her down.” Polly paused thoughtfully. “I think I’ll teach you a few of those skills next time you come to see me.”

  “I sure as hell hope you’re right, Polly. I sure as hell hope you’re right.”