“After that, the Focus began to change the household. I remember the night she came to us in October of ‘63, after three days of meditation and soul searching, and apologized for treating us so badly. I’m still not certain why I was able to forgive her for what she’d done to me, but I did anyway.”
Sky didn’t have to ask. He had seen the tricks from other Focuses. Given the darkness he had sensed in Lori, he believed them. Juice torture as punishment for the entire group, withholding juice and keeping everyone stripped down to the edge of withdrawal. Or, if she felt even nastier, pumping her entire household up to the edge of Monster and threatening to untag them all. A few weeks of that sort of treatment and the household would literally kill any fellow household members who stepped even slightly out of line.
“How many died, Tim?” Sky asked, surprised to find his voice a low Crow whisper.
“The Focus killed one herself, a man who snapped because he couldn’t take the pressure and went after her with an axe. The household drove a woman to suicide and sentenced another man to death after he messed up too many times: tied him up and dropped him in a vacant apartment to go into withdrawal.
“After the Focus apologized she appointed Dave Bile the household boss, gave him a six month term, and said the next household boss would be elected without her interference. She also said she wouldn’t use the juice as punishment anymore, and a Focus should never be the household head in any circumstances.”
“The Focus’s second household lasted only three months,” Ann said. “Then she discovered the demographic catastrophe and Dr. Robert Masterson, who she recruited, as a normal, into the household. After that, the Cause was born and her Transform trading days started. Connie was Lori’s second Cause recruit, in 64, right after Focus bitch Biggioni stuck us with Monster hunting duties to keep Lori occupied. We didn’t finish putting the household together until Lori got her PhD in June of 65.” A mere two and a half years ago. Yes, thus the raw sense of newness to this household, despite Lori’s many years of experience as a Focus.
“We’re not sure, but we think maybe the ice queen had an affair with Dr. Masterson,” Tim said.
“If they did, they didn’t consummate it sexually,” Sky said.
“How in the hell do…” Ann stopped and quivered, getting a little less interested in jumping into bed with Sky tonight and causing Lori to blow a gasket. “Our personal lives are open to you, Sky, aren’t they?”
“Only if I’m interested,” Sky said. “Lori is more than a little intriguing.”
“Go after Lori if you can, Sky,” Ann said. “She needs a little humanizing. Tenderizing? Hell, I’ve gone after her with the tenderizing mallet many times to no effect.” The intimacy shocked him from a Transform about her Focus, but Sky heard in her voice the many times this conversation had been held, these lines spoken. Things clicked. It was the exasperation of an older family member for a wayward younger sibling.
“There’s little love in the Focus,” Tim said. “Abstract, perhaps. You’ll have to see one of our Friday nights to understand. She’s a Focus bitch, but of course, she’s our Focus bitch.” There was little love in him for the Focus. Respect, yes, but no love, all the result of his early years in the Rizzari Transform household.
“Mostly, we just tolerate her,” Ann said. “We admire her, distantly, for what she’s doing as a researcher, but despite how smart she is she’s wasting her life with her research. The best thing the Focus has done for the world is to get our household together and let us run with the Cause. We’re the ones who try to work with Crows, Arms, Chimeras and, the most dangerous of all, other Focuses. Our Focus prefers cold dead Monster corpses.” Ann paused. “And she still has five hours left on her last bathroom cleaning assignment, and I refuse to cover for her again just because she has too much academic correspondence to deal with.”
Sky turned away. This was painful to listen to, almost too painful. He knew of households who had enslaved their Focuses. But why? How? In all the cases Sky knew, the households needed to restrain, physically, their enslaved Focuses. Was her household blackmailing her? Wielding some emotional club?
He couldn’t believe either answer. Not for Lori.
No, Lori let her household enslave her. Sky had no doubt if Lori wanted to, she could take over in but a few seconds. With her charisma, she wouldn’t take more than a week smiling at them, to use the Canadian term for positive uses of Focus charisma, to have them loving her, kissing her feet, and following her every whim. Instead, she let them hate her.
Did she need to be hated? Or was this an illusion, the same as the way she let her household believe they were the ones in charge of Major Transform politics?
Except Ann’s tie to Lori had to be love, and with love, you opened up so many other possibilities for strong emotion: dependency, jealousy and sexual tension, to name a few. Sky couldn’t get a feel for which of those strong emotions lay behind Ann’s comments. Worth some study, though. “Perhaps,” Sky said, wincing in advance for the reaction he was certain to create. “Perhaps you could just love her despite her rough edges. Win her over.”
“We’ve tried,” Tim said. “It doesn’t work. There is no love, nor any tears, in the Focus.” Ann nodded at Tim’s words, though Ann, unlike Tim, still had hope. She had seen some glimmers of love.
“Enough!” Sky said. “Enough! I can’t take your dislike of your own Focus. You’re all fools. She cries. I’ve seen her crying, already, twice, and I haven’t spent even a full day near enough to Lori to tell.” He stalked out of the gym, passed the goddamned doctor walking back to the guesthouse with a plate of food in his hand, deep in conversation with Tina and Amy and oblivious to the world. He raided the kitchen himself and in a fit of pique, called the kitchen mice to him, and had them follow him up three flights of stairs into the attic, bounding in unison. There, he fed them his dinner.
Enkidu: December 18, 1967
Enkidu stood and frowned. Another Chimera approached his forest shack, setting the Gals to yowling. “Enkidu?” Cleo asked.
The shack nestled at the edge of a small clearing, patches of grass and dirt under giant hickories. The clearing was far more comfortable than the cramped shack, even with rain threatening, and he had been watching over the Gals as they enjoyed the cold winter air. “A visitor. Be wary.” He stretched out his half-Beast form to its full seven feet of height and did a quick warm-up. Cleo quieted the other Gals as best she could. He had been experimenting with drawing the Gals further into the Law, but progress was slow, just as progress was slow rebuilding his home. He envisioned a log stockade, but so far all he had to show was four trimmed logs.
He hated his current position in life.
Now this, a Chimera he hadn’t even metasensed until it came within a quarter mile. Dangerous. Enkidu strode out to the edge of the cleared area, in the center of the rutted dirt road, and waited.
“Explain yourself,” Enkidu said, when the Chimera appeared. He was a short squat thing, also in his half-Beast form. He wore human clothes, though, and carried a large pack on his back. “Why are you here?”
“I come at the bequest of our Master, the Wandering Shade,” the Chimera said. “I am named Torma.”
“You aren’t one of us,” Enkidu said. The falling mist on this gray day began to spit larger raindrops. He crouched, ready to fight. His Master had written to him of another Beast on his way, but Enkidu felt no need to be pleasant.
“I am, and I am not,” Torma said. “I’m not here to fight or challenge. I’m here to talk and bring gifts. I humbly beseech your presence.”
This damned thing talked funny. However, he did smell of the Law, now that Enkidu was close enough to catch his scent. His comments brought forth Law based formalities demanding peace. Enkidu relaxed. “Come, then. Let us speak. Do I smell jerked Caribou?”
“That you do.”
Jerked Caribou was the finest delicacy the Hunters knew, an exquisitely spiced treat. Wandering Shade had the only known source,
and there wasn’t anywhere near enough to go around.
They sat on the wooden platform made from the rotted western remnant of the shack. Torma formally presented the pack of jerked Caribou to Enkidu, concluding the Law-based ritual. “Tell me of yourself, Torma. Why did the Shade send you?” Enkidu asked. He put the pack down beside him, on the other side from Torma.
“I’m here to pick your brain about our common enemies, the Arms. I am on a quest to prove myself and my kind,” Torma said.
Quest? Enkidu’s Law contained nothing of quests. “Your kind?”
“I’m a Stalker, the second Stalker.”
Enkidu studied the Stalker visually and with his metasense. His half-Beast form had four arms, the two extras shrunken in width, flat up against his body, under his clothes. Chitin covered his black skin, on all but his head and lower arms, vaguely insectoid.
“What makes you a Stalker instead of a Hunter?”
“Three things, one of which I’m sure you noticed already.” He referred to the fact Enkidu hadn’t metasensed him until he came close. “Second, my fighting form is much farther from human than the current Law allows Hunters.” Torma reached into his pack and produced a Polaroid, one Enkidu recognized as taken by Wandering Shade. Vicious. Enkidu was impressed.
“You can’t speak in your combat form?”
Torma nodded. “It’s a trade-off. The form does interfere with my ability to command, but it also improves my combat capabilities and my ability to hide.”
“I understand,” Enkidu said. He didn’t like the style; it was an entirely different direction than he was going with his research into pack fighting. “And the third?”
“No pack. I subsist on a single older Monster I’ve subdued. Old Monsters don’t die when you take their élan. They’re quite powerful, though. To take their élan requires I be in my combat form.”
“Not for me,” Enkidu said. He would rather stay a Hunter, thank you very much. For one thing, the last thing he wanted as a bed partner was some multi-ton scaly Monster with a bad attitude.
“It might be,” Torma said. “Depending on how I do on my quest. If I kill or capture one of the Arms and present the bitch to Wandering Shade, I’ll win the right to more Stalkers. I might even get the Wandering Shade to switch one of the Hunters into a Stalker.”
A competition between the Hunters and Stalkers, then, to decide which of them could do the most damage to their enemies in Wandering Shade’s crazy war. “Regardless of the outcome I wish you the best against the Arms,” Enkidu said. He lied. “What are your other potential results?”
Torma sighed. “If I die, I’m the last Stalker. If both the Arm and I survive to fight another day, I win the right for the Wandering Shade to make one more Stalker, and another later quest.”
“Arms are tough, far stronger than we are on a pound for pound basis,” Enkidu said. “What makes you think you have any chance at all?”
“I bagged a Crow,” Torma said. “That’s how I won my name. Now, before you ask, Wandering Shade did help. I haven’t perfected my hiding abilities, but if I can prove myself, the Wandering Shade said he can make it so when I mature I can hide without his help.”
“So you’re nothing but an experiment,” Enkidu said. “Unproven on your own.” He sneered. “Get out of my sight. As a Hunter you wouldn’t have a name.”
“You won’t help me understand the Arms, how they fight? Please?”
Sniveling wretch. Enkidu stood and roared at Torma, who scrabbled back. “Arms fight with any and all weapons. They’re quicker and they’re stronger pound for pound but we’re stronger overall. They’re monkey fighters who prefer to climb up above battle. They’re meaner and nastier than we are, but don’t have the juice to run as fast as we do, mile after mile; you can chase them down if you need to, and run away if you get too injured. Lastly, they have no honor and will not accept your surrender. That enough?”
“Thank you, greatest Enkidu, thank you.”
Enkidu growled again. Torma backed off further. “I have questions I would like…”
“Shut up and leave,” Enkidu said. He was not impressed. “Stick to scragging Crows. That looks to be your speed.”
Torma continued to cautiously back away until he was out of sight.
Enkidu turned to Cleo and the Gals. “That went well,” he said, with his first real smile in two months. He called out “Who wants some jerky!” Turned out all the pack did.
He just hoped Torma didn’t get lucky and bag an Arm. Enkidu had no interest in becoming some damned weakling Stalker. Or losing his pack.
Sky: December 20, 1967 – December 22, 1967
“Ostie,” Sky said, and brought himself out of his meditative state. Two more days of training and trying to cope with the Inferno household had given him a bit of the panic, now dispelled by an hour of meditation. Whenever one of the household members made a pass at him, he demanded they write a note to Lori requesting an exception to her ‘grubby meathooks off my people’ demand. He had collected five notes so far. Definitely panic inducing.
This distraction was different. Five Crows gathered in the Arnold Arboretum, only two kilometers from Inferno. He wondered what brought them there.
Sky snuck out of his nest in the attic, bounding and fence-walking through the cloudy night toward the meeting. The training and exercise did him good, though if he didn’t find an extra source of dross soon, he was going to be hurting. As he approached the group, one of the Crow signatures vanished without moving. Interesting. Some sort of tactical metasense shielding. Good trick, Sky muttered to himself. He must be an old Crow, a peer. This encounter ought to be fun.
He approached the Crows by rooftop. When he reached the Crows he leapt off a greenhouse roof down to the edge of the meeting, triggering his signature dross construct as he leapt: the night sky illusion, dross art at its finest. He landed and walked toward the group. One of the Crows had panicked himself into a little ball at Sky’s showy appearance. What was a Crow so young doing in a flock like this?
“Welcome to our Crow-moot. You must be Sky,” the Crow with the metasense shielding said in a whisper. Sky nodded. This Crow was short and black haired, slightly built, but covered with dross constructs far beyond Sky’s capabilities. Sky guessed he was a Guru.
“Yes,” Sky said. “Crow, known as Sky, at your service. I couldn’t help but notice your meeting, and although I am only a visitor to your fine city, I decided to chance attendance. If I may be so bold, may I ask my fine feathered friends as to the purpose of this gathering?”
“Shadow,” said the original speaker with a grunt. Oh ho! Sky smiled. He had wanted to meet the legendary Guru Shadow for several years. Shadow’s letters to Sky had been what prompted Sky to become interested in the world again, convincing him if he did not act, the world would soon act upon him.
“Vizul Lightning,” said the Crow on Shadow’s left. Vizul was tall, lean, with sandy blonde hair, and a pair of large German Shepherds by his side. Unappreciative of Sky’s entrance as well.
“Midgard,” said the third Crow. Midgard was a tall, thin black man with tight curled hair. He, at least, was impressed.
“Sinclair,” said the fourth Crow. He had been the one Sky had metasensed as wedded to his typewriter. He was an immaculately dressed businessman and nervous, a Crow who had seen too much. The invisible person he had been talking to several days ago presumably had been Shadow.
The Crow curled up in a fetal ball did not speak. Sky smiled at the poor thing huddled under the lilac bush and dropped a ‘no panic’ dross construct on the Crow.
Instead of letting it affect him, the young Crow sucked it in for sustenance. Sky widened his eyes. A Crow curled up in a panic ball shouldn’t be able to do that. “Thank you,” the young Crow said, his voice almost inaudible. “Pardon the panic. Name’s Newton. After what we’ve been talking about your sudden appearance gave me the willies.”
Sky looked over at Shadow, who shrugged. “Chatty for a panicky young Crow, isn
’t he?”
“He patterns himself after Gilgamesh. He even managed to find some Arm dross a few months ago.”
“Focus Rizzari’s lab,” Sky said, making the connection. He had wondered what Crow would dare to take Arm dross after the Philadelphia Massacre. Sinclair, Midgard and Vizul took a few steps back.
“Sorry if you claimed it,” Newton said. “I apologize.”
“No apology needed, I wasn’t around then,” Sky said, and sighed. Normally, he didn’t whisper, but he found himself whispering to these Crows now that he knew them. “I’m staying in Focus Rizzari’s attic while helping her people on a problem of theirs, and getting some training on the side.”
“You live in her attic!?!” Sinclair squeaked, edging away from Sky and creeping behind Shadow. Midgard and Vizul joined him. “They know you’re there?”
Sky nodded. “The relationship is not without its detriments. Back home, I’ve spent enough time with the Toronto Focuses to get over much of my distrust of Transforms in number. Still, actually living in a Transform household is difficult for me. In a sense, I am hiding in the attic, though at least the senior members of the household are aware of me.”
“Impressive,” Shadow said. “The Rizzari household supports more Transforms than any other Focus household I’m aware of and the Rizzari Housebound is one of the darker Focuses we know of. Few of us here in the States trust Focuses well enough to deal with them so directly.”
“Occum does.”
“Ah, Occum. He only deals with one of Rizzari’s household Transforms, not the Housebound,” Shadow said. “He’s one of the topics we’ve been discussing today.”
True. Occum was a local Boston Crow and he was pointedly not here. In fact, the Arboretum was just outside of Occum’s metasense range, if he was home with his menagerie. Not one of life’s little coincidences, eh?
“You find his new avocation somewhat disquieting? He’s not the first Crow to deal with the Beast Men. I’ve done so myself.”
Midgard ran ten paces into the trees before he managed to control himself. Even when he did, he stayed back, carefully keeping Shadow between himself and Sky. Sky thought nothing of it. He had been a panicky Crow himself once and he couldn’t find it in him to cast aspersions on any other Crow’s panic. Strangely, though, Newton stood and parked himself beside Shadow, studying Sky intently. This Newton was one curious young Crow.
All Beasts Together (The Commander) Page 18