everyone’s heads off ever since her broken arms and legs healed.
“What?” Tonya asked, not much more than a grunt.
“Got a phone call, and a parcel delivery person. We’ve got a certified letter invitation, from the honest to goodness New York City mayor’s office, to take a shot at this Monster.”
“We don’t normally do the city Monsters,” Tonya said. They were far too dangerous for her tastes.
“Ma’am, you’ve got to see the bounty they’ve put up on this Monster. High five figures.”
Damn.
---
Tonya’s household consisted of nine triads and one extra, that is, nine male Transforms and eighteen woman Transforms, and one extra woman Transform. Eleven of the women had spouses, as did seven of the nine male Transforms, and two of her Transforms were married to each other. Nineteen men in total. Of those nineteen, ten of the fittest served as part of her tiny private army – for bodyguard duty and for helping with Monster hunts. Ten men, just ten. Not enough, in Tonya’s mind, to hunt down a who-knows-how-old lion-form Monster somehow loose in the Bronx. Because of the Monster, the south Bronx became a ghost town around dusk and dawn, the Monster’s preferred time to hunt. People panicked, called in the National Guard, but so far the Monster continued to elude them.
Tonya stood over a table with her men in a corner of the warehouse. Bare bulbs hung from the high ceiling to provide harsh illumination below. Her household was using the warehouse for transitional housing as they waited to finish the build out of her latest new home. Three other long tables stood beside this one, to constitute what passed as a dining room. Luxury housing this wasn’t, but she only expected to live here for a couple of weeks. “We’re going to catch it at dusk or early night,” Tonya said. Her men would be at a disadvantage, but not Tonya. Her Focus capabilities: her ability to move juice, her ability to metasense, her charisma, and the occasional screwy talent to pick up information she shouldn’t be able to pick up, all worked better at night. The true predator Monsters, Tonya knew, were weakest at night. Nobody knew why, but Tonya job wasn’t to solve mysteries. Her job was to get things done.
“Okay, ma’am,” Bobby Harper said. “Are we going to bother with the dogs?”
“We’ll take one, just in case. That, and a herd of sheep.”
The mayor’s office wouldn’t like the sheep, but if you wanted the best, you lived with their tools.
Bobby frowned. “I was hoping you wouldn’t say that. We’ll end up with sheep guts on the front pages of the tabloids again.”
“Better than Transform guts any day,” Tonya said. “Now, here’s the plan.” She pulled over the map of the Bronx and gave the orders.
The phone rang, the private phone, and Tonya stopped counting her Hail Mary. Anything to quiet the nerves. She hadn’t been so nervous before a Monster hunt since the third one. Her four months of guilt-dreams, ever since the rat-Monster episode, paled before this. The night before this Monster hunt, she couldn’t sleep a minute.
“Biggioni,” Tonya said, as she answered her private phone. The warehouse had one private room with walls and Tonya used it for her office. And bedroom.
“It’s a trap.”
Tonya took a deep breath. Keaton. Again. She never suspected Keaton would turn out to be a chatterbox who needed to talk to her regularly and often. Keaton, the mass murderer and excessively lonely Arm. At least the Arm understood security and didn’t want to talk to her again in person. Tonya had managed to talk Keaton out of pestering the other Focuses in the Network, at least until the current political fracas abated. So far, her rough agreement with Keaton held; Keaton no longer took household Transforms.
“What’s a trap?”
“Monster lion. Bronx. I have an underworld contact who heard a rumor that someone hired the Antonella crime family to bring it into the Bronx. I smell that damned bitch Julius again, Tonya.”
“No names.” Well, perhaps she didn’t understand security as well as Tonya thought.
“I don’t care right now. Not if they’re going after my favorite Focus.” She broke my legs and arms, tied my legs into a pretzel, and now she considers me her favorite Focus? Tonya winced. Keaton’s babbling pretty much answered any questions about what would happen to any Focuses Keaton disliked, now, didn’t it.
“I’ve got a contract myself, with the government, and I’m in no mood to back down,” Tonya said.
“Idiot. I want to help, but I can’t get anywhere near your bodyguards and you know why,” Keaton said. “I’ll be around, though…hunting enemy Transforms.” Click.
Just great. Just fucking great.
Tonya looked up and noticed Rhonda standing in her office doorway, a shocked look on her face. Tonya realized she had said the last comment aloud.
She couldn’t remember the last time she actually swore out loud. It wasn’t ladylike.
The hunt didn’t start to go bad until they approached the lion Monster. She took the bait on the third day, at dusk, gorging herself on the small herd of sheep they had penned into the intersection of Hunts Point Avenue, Halleck Street and East Bay Avenue. According to the evidence provided them, the lion Monster confined her hunting to the Hunts Point neighborhood of the Bronx.
They hadn’t seen Keaton, or any hit squads, either mobster related or from their Transform enemies in the Lucy Peoples Society. One less thing to worry about, Tonya decided. She waved her people forward, stopped praying, and started the attack. They ran in to within a block and started blazing away with their rifles loaded with .707 caliber monster rounds.
The Monster didn’t drop. Instead, she loped off into the shadows of early evening and started to hunt them.
Tonya got a good look at the Monster when she dropped Bobby Harper. Tonya’s charisma hadn’t been able to stop her.
She got another look when the Monster ripped John Cizina in half. Again, her charisma she hadn’t been able to stop the Monster.
Claude Oliver, a normal spouse of Clair Oliver, died helpless when the lion Monster attacked him and ripped his throat out before he could flinch. Tonya missed another chance at an eyeball grab, stuck trying to get Todd’s attention when Claude bought it.
Now Tonya stood alone. Tommy was down with a broken leg a block back. Robert Dawson tried to hold his insides in, clawed in passing, about twenty yards back. He wasn’t a Transform and he wouldn’t survive his wound. Tonya met the Monster’s gaze for the fourth time in the alleyway. The rest of the world was still lit by the remnants of the day, but the alley was dark. Tonya had tried to use the alley to circle around the Monster to get the drop on her, hoping if she closed her charisma might have more effect. That had been no more effective than anything else she had tried. Now the monster came for Tonya.
The lioness Monster still didn’t cow. Instead, she fought back, resisting Tonya’s charisma and shrugging off her wounds, which were numerous. Hell, the Monster was missing a part of her skull and one ear. She still didn’t drop.
“Die,” Tonya commanded. The lioness Monster stared at her, coughed, and exuded unnatural terror, a bowel loosening instinctive terror that once haunted her ancestors back when her ancestors wore natural fur and perhaps even flicked their tails.
The lioness shook her head but her wounds didn’t bleed. This Monster healed, incredibly, just like a Focus. Perhaps better, like an Arm. Tonya grimaced at this new Monster trick. Warnings echoed in her head, from Focus Rizzari’s presentation of a year ago: “Monsters with many years under their belts will have tricks and natural capabilities none of us can imagine, because the bad juice they carry is so potent. The Monster transformation never stops.” She had sneered at Rizzari’s idiocy, dry dusty theory spoken by someone who had never seen a Monster in her life, but here it was, proven right. The hard way. This was a hell of an old Monster, dumb as a stump, one of the stupidest Monsters Tonya had ever encountered, but utterly unstoppable.
“Die.”
> Tonya didn’t have any place to back up, not any more, caught at the interior corner of two brick walls. The Monster lioness stopped and crouched just over fifteen feet away, and watched Tonya. Fought Tonya’s charismatic lock. Fought hard; Tonya refused to let the lioness Monster move, yet she moved anyway.
Readied to pounce.
Pounced.
Tonya screamed and hit the Monster with her charisma, putting the last of her own personal juice into the command. Freeze in place! Do Not Move! She shrugged to the side, and the Monster rammed the wall head on, inches to the left side of Tonya. The Monster’s front left paw sliced Tonya’s arm to the bone on the way by, taking her hand with it.
She expected the creature to shrug off the impact of the wall, gut her and kill her, but the creature slumped to the ground, immobile, stunned for the moment by Tonya’s charisma and control. Tonya grabbed at her with her good right hand, skin to skin contact. Now, the Monster’s foul juice became distinct, as distinct as Tonya’s own Transforms always appeared to her.
As a Focus, Tonya could manipulate juice on any Transform she touched, even foul Monster juice. And her blood was up. She ordered the Monster’s juice out of her brain.
The juice left.
The brain of the Monster died instantly.
Now the heart and lungs.
Tonya smiled as the Monster died again. “Now!” she screamed.
She
The Good Doctor's Tales Folio One Page 9