Uh oh. Now he remembered the dross leak story, a story about Rizzari’s household’s Crow contact, Annette Sadie Tucker. She was a published poet and a favorite of the Crows. He had written to her first, after he paid dear to old Occum for the address. She was the absolutely wrong person to piss off. Things were definitely going down the loo.
“This fucking cocksucker Crow rolled me sexually, ma’am,” Sadie said.
“My apologies to all of you,” he said.
“Shut up,” Rizzari said. “We aren’t talking to you, yet.”
Oooh, the royal we. We have a pissed off hard-case killer Focus at point blank range, old Sky, now do we. We are so screwed our threads are stripped.
“How did you figure that out?” the Focus said. The wide sleeves of her gown draped over her arms as she crossed them. “Save for one anecdotal report by an Arm suffering from low juice, Crows don’t have any charisma capabilities at all.”
Marde! Arms! Worse every moment. Of course, Sky thought, if he had actually used his charisma on Sadie, this fracas wouldn’t be happening. He hadn’t thought Tucker, the poetic realist, would have deluded herself so easily.
“He made me lust after him,” Sadie said, not at all hiding her profound distaste.
Fils de pute! She’s a lesbian. Was she right? Did he have a Crow talent he hadn’t known existed?
Darkness rolled into his eyes. The benighted Focus was focusing her not-inconsiderable-charisma on him. Her voice thundered with the voice of God, or at least a high-ranking Buddha. “You have angered me, Crow. You have abused the hospitality of a Transform and a Focus, and I permit no one to abuse my Transforms. Especially not other Major Transforms, who should by their very responsibility as Major Transforms know much better. Leave my sight, Crow, and never return. Your name shall never be uttered in the household of Lorraine Rizzari with any kindness.”
His mission wasn’t worth this grief; he would actually have to exert himself to fight off his target’s charisma. It took work for Focus charisma to affect a Crow. Rizzari was one powerful Focus.
“Wouldn’t you need to learn my name before you can ban it?” he said. He fought off the nerves and repressed the urge to rub his extra wide nose. “I will apologize to Sadie, for if I used a juice trick on her, it was without my knowledge or volition. I am…”
“Leave,” Focus Rizzari said, her voice quivering with rage. “Or else.” Ah. She possessed a temper and had rightfully lost it, if he had inadvertently done what Sadie accused him of doing. He could actually believe it. A trick such as this did explain his, um, relative success at acquiring bed partners…and would make the story of his failure much more interesting.
However, he too had his dignity. He had been tossed around like a sack of dirt, insulted, and been frowned at (using the Canadian term for hostile charisma use). This cute little Focus who had already broken his heart was about to learn that Crows weren’t without their capabilities. This American beauty with the bobbed black hair was about to meet her first real Crow. If she had met one before she would never be dismissing him so casually.
“What?” he said, his voice rising above a whisper for the first time in the conversation. “You threaten me with the juice ripping trick you use on Monsters? You’ll find my juice far harder to touch and your attack far deadlier to yourself than to me.” Standing, he drew himself up to his full height and let loose his aura of power and ferocity. He was Crow, dammit, the oldest Crow in Canada, the sixth oldest surviving Crow on the continent, and he refused to let some half-baked chit of a Focus less than half his age cow him!
No one could face the aura of a Crow and not know fear. All but three of the people in the pavilion backed off or fainted dead away. Sadie frowned at him, the Focus raised her eyebrows, and one woman Transform, who hadn’t said a word so far, stood at her Focus’s side and studied him. Sky tried not to think too much about the fact that half of those who backed off in fear pulled weapons on him. Real weapons, with nasty hollow barrels and bullets inside, not imitation medieval swords.
Focus Rizzari, who didn’t react to his aura of fierce, barked a single laugh. “That’s it?”
Scratch the half-baked. For a moment he wondered if he should use what he termed the Method, his version of the most potent senior Crow trick, and use said trick to amplify his fierceness. However, these weren’t real enemies, and, perhaps more importantly, he had never used the trick without knocking himself out, or worse. He decided against.
“Um, ma’am,” the heretofore silent Transform woman said. “How does this Crow know about your Monster hunting? We’ve never mentioned that in our letters to any of the Crows.”
Sky made a wild guess and decided the quiet one was Ann Chiron, Focus Rizzari’s anthropologist friend and a person responsible for many a paranoid Crows’ nightmares. She was living up to her reputation of figuring out too much, despite the fact he had to be the first Crow she had seen in person.
The Focus’s eyes narrowed into a volcanic glare once she realized the import of her companion’s comment. Then the Focus did something Sky barely believed: she modulated her juice flow to signal two and only two of her Transforms. Juice flow as a guided signaling device! Blessed name of Buddha! Sky had never conceived such a trick was possible.
While he gawked in surprise at Focus Rizzari’s juice trick, two hefty Transform men picked him up, carried him out of the pavilion and into the trees to the back. They heaved him into a foot deep ponding of casual water, where he sank into the mud and muck.
He let himself float in the mud with his head barely above the water. He adjusted his metabolism to ward off hypothermia, created a dross construct to scour Rizzari’s tent area of all its dross, and proceeded to do a little watching and a little thinking.
Ample evidence suggested a lack of thinking going on, on his part. He had never messed up one of his little projects so badly. Worse, he couldn’t figure out why. The obvious answer made no sense to him; he had treated Sadie the same as he had treated dozens of other Transforms, and no one had called him on it before. Why now?
Puzzles intrigued him, one of the reasons he had acquired a reputation as an adventurous Crow.
He studied Rizzari and her people with his metasense. The Focus calmed down quickly after her goons tossed him into the mud, and talked with her people. They knew he lingered in range and they discussed response options. Ann pointed out that he most likely heard their conversation, based on her understanding of Crow capabilities, and everyone but Rizzari ignored her. Rizzari just winked in his general direction. She didn’t care what he did or found out.
Now that was annoying.
Being pissed won the war over panic, at least for the moment. He called over one of the dogs attending the tourney, a husky, and bribed the doggie with the location of a forgotten hunk of meat. He followed that with Sadie’s scent pattern, passed along to the dog with a dross construct, then ordered the dog to sneak into Sadie’s supplies and steal her ladies’ unmentionables.
If the dog succeeded, he would go after Rizzari’s next.
Other far more annoying ideas came to him, but he decided turning her people into Monsters would be an overreaction. At least a little. His need for amusement was rather large and his need for revenge quite small.
He considered whether his cause was lost and decided not. He had attracted Rizzari’s interest now, her curiosity. She burned to discover how he knew of her household’s Monster hunting. How he had located them at the tourney. Why he located them, as her household agreed this was no happenstance meeting.
An alliance was still possible. His mission still possessed the remote chance of success. His love interest? Well, the juice said all sorts of things. No Major Transform in their right mind ever listened to their juice.
Of course, no Major Transform was ever in their right mind.
While he waited, he meditated on the world. The world as it was he accepted. It was as it was. The there-ness of it was immanent. Illusions were for mortals, and he soug
ht Buddha-hood by banishing all thoughts. Worldness became.
In his dreams, he ran with Focus, listened to Man and Woman hatch their schemes, wrestled with Arm, hunted with Beast for Monsters and game. They had all rejected the society that despised them and went to the edge of the tundra, to live as humans were meant to live, primitive and wild, and delve into secrets unwise to ponder. They all got so low on juice they had gone nuts. He couldn’t have enjoyed it more.
“Are you still there, Crow?”
For a moment, he heard Woman’s voice, but the voice was real and he brought himself back from the world of memories to the waking world. Night had fallen and Focus Rizzari had come alone to visit. She crouched at the edge of the muck and water, no more bothered by the cold than he.
“Yes,” he said.
“Why?”
“There is peace here. The world is night and I am one with nature. It helps me forget my many mistakes…and of course mask my glow.”
“Their hearts are going to break if I tell them the angry Crow who almost raped Sadie is Sky, their favorite. We read your letters aloud on family night.”
Family night. No Focus household could work without rules, and from his letters to Ann, Tim, Lori and Sadie, he knew about Saturday rules. Those with family spent all Saturday with their families and the singles created space for them. At night, the singles and a few interested families would gather in the great room in the basement to share stories. He so loved to hear of the Rizzari household.
“I know,” Sky said, sad. He wanted to cry. “Ann will figure it out, if she hasn’t already.” He retrieved his metasense from wherever it had wandered to and examined Rizzari. She had been weeping, alone. She thought she had messed up and she had, nearly as bad as he did. Which held precedence, anyway? Instinctive protection of the household or instinctive politeness to other Major Transforms? One guess is all you get.
“Maybe. Not yet.”
To his shock, he metasensed that Rizzari was hot for him, the juice working on her the same way it worked on him. This might be a problem if she was as much of a virgin ice queen as Ann’s letters made her sound. Who knew how she would react if the juice forced cracks in her icy shell with a little juice-powered heat? This was likely to complicate his plans to win her hand and interest.
“I really didn’t know I used my charisma to seduce women,” Sky said, barely repressing the urge to flee. “Nor did I use it to pique your interest in me, madame Focus.”
Despite their juicy affinity his personality appeared to rub her the wrong way. “I didn’t follow that last,” Lori said, tensing. “Something about house entryways and seduction?”
“My pardon, my lady, I slip back into my native tongue when shocked.”
“Shocked?” Rizzari’s glow lit up in sudden anger and she pulled out a 9 mm handgun. With silencer. “Don’t you have any respect for anyone’s personal privacy? Metasense this, creep!” she said, squeezing off one round, then another, before emptying the rest of her magazine at him. She had realized he sensed her physical interest in him and totally lost control, her buried anger at whatever had been annoying her before his arrival coming to the fore.
The bullets would have hit, except for his ten feet up and fifteen feet to one side leap, leapt long before the weapon pointed his direction. As was his general procedure, he left an illusion of himself bleeding out in the water. All this because he figured out she was horny? Now he knew how she would react to cracks in her shell. Bad, bad, bad.
Fancy walking around with a silenced 9 mm, he told himself a moment later. He hoped she had been counting on him having Major Transform quality healing abilities and hadn’t actually meant to do him serious injury. At least she had given a couple of warning shots before she shot at him. He feared she harbored the same sort of twisty psychopathic darkness inside her as any Arm.
She replaced the spent magazine and slipped in another, ready.
Focus Rizzari might think she was a Crow expert, but not if she was going to get upset at a tiny bit of inadvertent Crow voyeurism, and educating this ol’ 150 cm strip of nastiness looked like far too much work for him. He quit. Time to go back home, grovel for forgiveness, and plead to the Focuses to send someone else to deal with this problem.
At least he wouldn’t come back in pine box, like the first who was sent.
Sky quietly climbed down to the ground and noticed Rizzari kneeling, silently weeping. Poor dear, upset about losing her temper and killing him. Her grief would last only as long as his illusory dross construct. Then she would probably lose her temper again. He fought off the urge to come by and stick a hand around her shoulder and tell her “Hey, don’t cry. That was just a Crow. There’s hundreds more where that one came from.” The jape would be worth it, save for the fact he couldn’t guarantee his dross construct that paralyzed the trigger fingers of normal cops would work on a Focus.
Enkidu: November 14, 1967
The cold rain trickled down Enkidu’s fur as he loped through the Illinois farmlands with his pack. They moved at night and hid in the day, called to a meeting by Wandering Shade. The meeting place was a neutral site, a heavily wooded area just southeast of Springfield, on Sangchris Lake. In the cloud-covered darkness, no one saw the group of them slipping through the empty fields.
“Have you seen, boss?” Cleo asked, the first words any of them had spoken for hours. Enkidu had been working with his pack Gals, making sure they were able to jog all night, and now the effort paid off. To his surprise, the jogging program had slowly altered his Gals’ shapes; they were now all bipedal. The shape alterations occurred only during his juice draws, and he had a theory – in the wild chaos of the juice draw, when his Gals edged over into Monster and so enabled him to take their juice as élan, they somehow borrowed his Beast Man guided shape-shifting ability for a moment.
His first discovery. He hoped Wandering Shade would be proud.
Enkidu was turning his Gals into an army. He didn’t want to mention that to his Master, not yet.
“Yah,” Enkidu said. He trusted his weather-sense, which at times showed him distant events and minds. “The Master wants me to help a new Hunter.” With any luck, he would get the new Hunter as a trainee and retrieve some of his lost status.
Enkidu slowed his pack to a walk and carefully entered the forest. It smelled of people under the rich aroma of wet dirt, although the state park was several miles away. He metasensed the new Hunter up ahead, but not his Master.
The new Hunter was a large gorilla, a ton of muscle, gristle and fur. Enkidu frowned at the Hunter’s teeth; save for overly large canines they weren’t fighting teeth. This creature ate plants!
Enkidu growled.
“Joshua, this is Enkidu and his pack,” Wandering Shade said. Enkidu turned to his Master’s voice and found him leaning against a giant oak tree, an unhappy look on his face. “Enkidu, this is Hunter Joshua.”
Enkidu growled louder. Was he no longer even a Hunter?
He charged Joshua and flattened the black-haired Beast before Joshua reacted. Enkidu snapped at Joshua’s throat, but Joshua rolled away before the bite landed. Joshua kicked Enkidu in the side, sending him rolling the other direction. Enkidu landed on his feet, impressed with Joshua’s strength.
They circled, both now caked in mud.
“How worthless are you?” Enkidu asked. “Can you even talk as a Beast? Or has your diet of leaves and grass ruined your mind.”
“I can talk just fine, youngster,” Joshua said. Unlike Enkidu his voice sounded slurred, as if his mouth was filled with chewing gum. Joshua picked up a head-sized rock and advanced on Enkidu, murder in his eyes. “And I prefer blood to grass. Soon I will taste yours.”
Joshua didn’t sound particularly smart, not with nothing but clichés for conversation. He did feel older as a Beast, but after a bit of thought, Enkidu decided Joshua’s problem was lack of élan.
Enkidu backed off and ran, first away from Joshua, then in a wide circle around the clearing commandeered by
Wandering Shade. He put on speed as Joshua, helplessly addled by low juice, gave chase. As Enkidu intended, he soon became the chaser, and soon after becoming the chaser he sprung at Joshua’s back, wolf ears pinned back, snarling his terror. He took Joshua down into the rich forest loam and sunk his forepaw claws into Joshua’s neck.
“I acknowledge your victory,” Joshua said, the Law echoing in his voice. Enkidu howled terror and bent his juice to the task of making Joshua’s humbling real.
“Now that’s different,” Wandering Shade said, appearing next to Enkidu. “What did you do there, at the end?”
“I reinforced his defeat, amplifying the relevant parts of the Law,” Enkidu said. He snapped at Joshua’s neck once more just because.
“You enslaved him?”
“I wish,” Enkidu muttered. His Master coughed and Enkidu bowed his head. “Forgive me, Master. He now cannot challenge my superiority without cause. I now outrank him.” Enkidu hoped Joshua wouldn’t find cause any time soon. With enough élan, Joshua would be much stronger than Enkidu, not a good thing at all.
“Very good,” Wandering Shade said. Enkidu backed off and Joshua got to his feet, unsteady. “You’re improving yourself, as I wished.”
Joshua slipped and went to one gorilla-knee into the mud. Enkidu growled at him. Not to Enkidu’s surprise, Joshua growled back as he got to his feet.
Wandering Shade frowned. “I sense the two of you can’t work together, any more than Odin can work with either of the two of you,” Wandering Shade said. He took his police officer’s cap off, flicked off a few late-season fallen leaves, and stuck it back on his head. “Do you have any idea why? You were able to work with Grendel.”
Enkidu scratched at a flea with his back right paw and nodded his head. “We worked together because we weren’t full Hunters, Master. I didn’t become a full Hunter until after I lived through my fight with the Ugly Arm. The fight proved my status at the juice level.”
“Now that’s interesting,” his Master said. “To me, the Philadelphia fight was a failure. I still think so.” He walked over to Joshua, examining the other Hunter. “But I’m not a Hunter, and my views on your status should properly carry no weight at the juice level.”
All Beasts Together (The Commander) Page 11