Just ducky. At least Keaton wasn’t a talker in the Dreaming; I caught her signing something cutting about Arm protocols to Gail, her body partly turned away from me. I despise being outclassed, and Gail definitely outclassed me here. She outclassed both of us Arms here.
“Open your memory to me about the attack dream,” Gail said. I wasn’t sure what she wanted of me, but I meekly obeyed her order and brought up the attack dream in my mind.
I remembered.
My Dreaming bed vanished from around me and the world of the attack dream reappeared. This time, Gail, Keaton and the Madonna joined me, at least translucently. The attack dream rolled for about five seconds before time stopped. I swore this version of the attack dream carried more details. For one thing, I heard cicadas and distant traffic, and smelled flower blossoms that weren’t magnolias.
“Look at your hands, Carol,” Gail said. I did, a strange and mildly painful thing to do, as the ‘I’ in the attack dream wasn’t doing any such thing. My ability to look outside the gaze lines of my attack dream-self appeared to be limited to swiveling my head, though.
My hands were older, and wore jeweled rings on ‘my’ middle, ring and pinky fingers. I tried to sign, failed, and tried again, burning juice. My real yet ghostly arms and hands appeared in front of me, signing “This isn’t me.” I recognized the significance of the rings, but kept it to myself for the moment. “This is a woman Transform.”
“Nor is it now,” Keaton signed. “Look at the cars in the driveways.”
I did, and it clicked. Tailfins. Studebakers. “Early ‘60s?” I signed.
“My guess as well,” she responded. She flickered her eyes at my hands, and I nodded. She also recognized the significance of the rings.
I, with difficulty, swiveled my head to look back at my pursuers. As before, they metasensed as barely Transforms, but with a Major Transform’s juice trace behind them. “What do these metasense like to y’all?” I signed. “They don’t make any sense to me.” Now that I thought about it, how was I able to metasense them using my current abilities when I wasn’t really the one being chased?
Have I ever mentioned that I hated the Dreaming?
“I’ve run into people like them before,” Gail said. “In Chicago, spying on me. They metasense the same way, as people who have been 5% transformed.”
Keaton didn’t respond. A glance back at her Artemis form answered an unasked question – she couldn’t metasense in the Dreaming, or at least wasn’t admitting to it. I was pleased, but otherwise didn’t react.
“Their kind can use juice if given it, but do not create their own,” the Madonna said. “What you can’t metasense directly is a variety of élan you have not yet encountered.”
“What are they?” Gail asked.
“I will let you investigate them on your own, as I have no good answer to your question,” the Madonna said. “Come by in person and I can give you an address where some approachable ones of their kind live.”
Bunny trail. “Can we get on with this? I wasn’t all under the covers when you yanked me back into the Dreaming, and my toes are getting cold.”
Keaton snickered, audibly. Crap, she was ‘almost’ a speaker in the Dreaming. Most annoying.
Neither Focus spoke, though.
“Okay,” Gail said, and the attack dream vision rolled forward, but an order of magnitude slower than normal.
I was glad Gail was on my side. I didn’t want someone with her Dreaming tricks as my enemy. Slowed up, the details of the attack dream were beyond amazing. The street beneath my feet did smell of fresh tar. It was uneven as well, badly leveled. I had missed the wrought iron fences around each house, and the worn dirt path that twisted along the road, between the roadside ditch and the wrought iron fences. The fences differed a bit from house to house, probably reflecting the fact that the faux plantation houses had been built years apart.
“Oh, this is Augusta, Georgia,” Gail said. “The Transform being chased is one of Focus Teas’ people.” I didn’t respond, and neither did Keaton, but Gail was correct. That was the significance of the rings, an affectation of Teas’ Transform women.
This time through the vision, I caught the moment when the Monster burst out of a faux plantation house, setting it ablaze. This was no ordinary Monster, but a creature reeking of age. For a silly moment, based on its shape, I thought we were dealing with a real dinosaur from umpteen millions of years ago, but then my Monster amulet – on my real body back in the real world, not here – metasensed it as between a thousand and two thousand years old. A Monster from the Progenitors’ era. Or an illusion of one, tricked into existence by The Man. That struck me as more likely, which also meant the damage to the faux plantation house was also an illusion.
No, I wasn’t going to be telling anyone that my Monster amulet could do this. Lori, Sky and Mizar already knew, and that was as far as the story would spread.
I metasensed behind the Monster and found the expected hole in the universe. “The Man is here, behind the Monster. He’s directing her,” I signed. “This dream wasn’t an attack on me, it was a warning.” Likely by the woman attacker who, this time, didn’t gift me a group sex message. “The Man is after me, personally.”
“Shit, Carol, you can’t be going off on your own, then,” Gail said. “The Man loves to go after stragglers.”
“Uh huh.”
“This is good news,” the Madonna said.
I turned and gave her a frosty look, right at the point in the attack dream where the attackers stabbed me. This time I picked up on the fact the swords were dross objects, more advanced than the ones Gilgamesh made but far less advanced than my Monster amulet or the Eskimo Spear. Somewhere in the not-to-distant area, but in the past, Focus Sarah Teas screamed and fell further into her induced insanity. “What I mean,” the Madonna said, “is that if the Man feared a Hunter victory, he wouldn’t be even thinking of attacking you. The only reason to attack you was to insure that we and the Hunters do a better job of wiping each other out.”
“Something’s changed, then,” I signed. “Because, according to my analysis, we currently don’t have a chance of winning.”
Gail and Keaton looked at each other, Keaton signing ‘I told you that’s why Carol left. To go think, not to give that oversized ambulatory rug a chance to seduce you.’ Gail rolled her eyes.
I didn’t respond, at least not yet. Keaton and Gail were far too chummy for my tastes. Jealous? A little. Keaton had served as Gail’s unofficial mentor and teacher for the first four years of her Focus career, and from what I saw, here, they were more than comfortable interacting with each other in the Dreaming. I could have thrown a fit, but I did appreciate Keaton’s newly revealed personal opinion of Mizar…and I had been the one to sic Mizar on Gail, after getting him to promise me he would be polite and woo Gail. Instead of his usual.
I didn’t think he had been successful.
Gail had to go ruin the moment by turning back to me and saying “It’s all right, Carol. We’ve all feared defeating the Hunter Empire was impossible.”
I mimed a sigh. “It’s not impossible,” I signed. “I just haven’t thought up the right strategy and tricks, yet.”
With that, this time I was able to successfully disengage from the Dreaming and wake myself up.
There, beaming at me with a certain recognizable hot look in her eye, from the foot of the hotel bed, was Lori. “Finally,” she said.
---
Lori licked sweat off me as I rested, sated. Outside of my motel room, the sun was high in the sky and I could hear the hotel maids doing their late morning cleaning. If I concentrated just right, I could metasense ghostly dross images of our recent activities floating in the air above and around us, flashbulb effects from various touches of heaven. What Mizar and I did, physically, to the rooms we screwed in, Lori and I did with the juice.
“If you want, Carol, ma’am, we might want to do this more often,” Lori said, softly, between licks. I luxuriated in pos
t-coital languor, and appreciated the humble ‘ma’am’. I had worried, back in the Yukon, that I had lost Lori forever. She forced herself to be so strong in public, and she craved the chance to be weak. Not to mention, she maintained an ongoing need to be punished for a whole plethora of so-called evils. Heh.
Unfortunately, I failed her up in the Yukon. I didn’t deal well with Mizar’s dominance, and I wasn’t the rock of strength and stability that she needed. Instead, she was left to her own strength, and she used her deep needs to seduce Mizar to our cause. The tie between them supplanted the tie between the two of us, and I doubted I would ever get a chance to rebuild it. Now, I recognized she hadn’t opened herself to me completely, but she gave me the forms, and I’d settle for that for now. Small steps.
I didn’t answer her question, though. I had thought the absence of Lori in my bed had been her decision, not mine. She read my thoughts and froze. “No, no, this was Mizar’s doing, not mine.”
“He sent you here?” Tiny tendrils of justified Arm anger began to wind their way out of my languid puddled state.
“Other way around,” she said. She paused to continue licking. “Pardon my scattered thoughts, ma’am. I’m not yet fully myself.” I touched her cheek with my hand. So beautiful. So much more than I deserved.
“Speak. Slowly.”
“I knew there was something I was missing in my life, and I had been pushing at my mind, trying to find it, but only yesterday. The day before. Or so. I found it.”
“You beat one of Mizar’s holds on your mind?” I hadn’t realized Mizar still had them on us. It shouldn’t have surprised me.
Her tongue circled my belly button and I purred. I might have been sated, but Lori wasn’t. I lived in the moment a lot more than she did, which meant she had plans. “I would like to take the credit, but I think Gail did the dirty deed. You know how attracted she is to him, and how she’s been fighting it?”
I grunted, at best a minor lie. I tried my best to stay out of that trainwreck, refusing to notice Mizar and Gail’s testy interactions.
“I think she decided it was time to separate her real feelings from her juice based feelings. I think that’s what disturbed Mizar’s hold on me.”
“So, what did Gail’s real feelings turn out to be?”
“The usual.” Followed by a Lori snort. “That is, Mizar was damping down her lust for him because he wanted to be the one to conquer her.” She paused, gave up on the licking, and skootched up the bed to rest her head on my shoulder. “Once she realized this, she changed her approach to him from ‘angry ice queen’ to a combination of flirting her juice at him while outwardly playing the falsely hard to get game. I think it’s driving Mizar nuts.”
“Which he deserves most wholeheartedly,” I said, thinking. If Gail disrupted this particular hold on Lori’s mind, had she disrupted any other holds of his on my mind?
I meditated. Lori let me, I suspect silently amplifying my soul-searching with her charisma.
“Son of a bitch,” I said. It hadn’t taken me long to find two obvious anomalies – first, Gilgamesh and I hadn’t found any personal time for each other since my return, and second, an answer to the question posed to me at the end of the attack dream sent to me last night. Lori, Sky and I hadn’t slept together since Mizar kidnapped Sky, way back in January, and it was Mizar’s fault. “I’m going to pin that motherfucker’s hide to a wall for this.”
Family drama at least did make a good distraction from my war preparation frustrations.
---
“I must apologize,” Mizar said. Lori and I had tracked him and Sky down back in the Chicago area, outside of the main Noble encampment slash hospital, built over the remains of Littleside. “My mind’s done something in one of the areas of the juice you haven’t either named or codified. Not consciously, and since it’s not something conscious it’s not under my control.”
I paced, attempting to keep my Arm beastliness under control. Mizar, chagrined, wasn’t doing anything to my subconscious right this instant. Sky had dropped a ‘don’t blow your cork, I have this under control’ message in my mind when we got in his range, now a half hour ago. So far, I had behaved.
This sort of nonsense was Sky’s contribution to our family. He had all of our backs, and based off a strange mental comment he had made to Lori about ten minutes ago, I think he had been the one to sideways point out Mizar’s subconscious tricks to Gail. He had definitely been the one who chased Lori in my direction and led Mizar off for some private man-to-man discussions outside of the Noble hospital. His excuse to Mizar had been to examine why Viscount Rangel felt different, which turned out to be Rangel’s promotion to Count.
“So, how do we get around this?” Lori said. She sat on a stump, icy, eyeing Mizar with suspicion. This meeting was well suited for its location, a clearing in a forest just over five miles west of Littleside. Blue sky above us, cold late winter air around us, and mud and slush at our feet…all mimicking our emotions. I paced back toward my family, leaving a deep combat boot print in the slushy mud with every stomp.
“Just tell me what I’ve been messing with, and I’ll pledge to stop,” Mizar said. “My juice pledge should override whatever my subconscious is doing with this unnamed aspect of the juice.” Someone had found him a suit applicable to a man-form Chimera of his size, although I think he had already split several seams on his dress shirt and muddied up the pants beyond cleaning or repair.
“What tipped you off, Sky?” I asked. This I could ask without losing my temper. Having to explain to Mizar all the ways he had messed up our sexual freedom was both galling and embarrassing. I didn’t look forward to dredging through the details.
“I wasn’t feeling the love for any of my White Mountain Barony woman-friends,” Sky said. “Most unnatural.”
“I only wish I understood the rules around these sexual dealings,” Mizar said, eyeing Sky with disdain. “Those Barony women aren’t part of our family at all.”
“They are and they aren’t,” Sky said. He sighed. I had the feeling he had tried to explain this before, and failed.
“Inferno and the White Mountain Barony, and Guru Occum, have been linked to us by the juice for almost a decade,” Lori said. “From well before there were even Baronies and Inferno wasn’t even named Inferno. Occum and I saved each other as young Major Transforms, although we’ve never, um. You know.” Slept together. Lori’s face reddened, and I refused to believe it was a true blush. This was something under her conscious control. She was playing a girl game and taking her frustration out on Mizar. “This came up before, between an Inferno household leader named Sadie Tucker and Sky, when they both had the eye for a woman commoner named…”
“So this women having sex with women thing, that’s actually real, not an old wives tale?” Mizar said.
I froze in my tracks, and both Lori and Sky did the statue imitation thing for a moment.
“It’s termed being a lesbian,” Lori said, after far too long a pause. “Which is what Sadie is. When you sleep with both, we term that being bisexual, which is what I am.” Well, what the juice had done to her, at least.
“Oh.” He turned to me, then to Lori, and then back to me. As he did so, he did the open mouth nose crinkle thing that meant a Chimera was processing scents. “Ohhhh.” Long pause. “How does that work, anyway?” I wanted to slap my face in disgust, but I didn’t.
“I think we can show you, if you want,” Lori said. Her voice was seductive, but the deep undertones of her Focus charisma were anything but. “All of us. In bed. Together.”
Mizar blushed, and his blush was real. “You do that?” Pause. “Isn’t that, um, immoral and unnatural?”
I hadn’t expected Mizar to turn out to be a sexual prude. Huh. However, his tone hadn’t been disapproval, but more along the lines of surprise and ‘what the fuck have I gotten myself into?’ Sexually naïveté might be closer the truth than sexual prudery, for him. Oh, and more than a little fear. “And you, as Beast, with your Mo
nsters, wasn’t unnatural?” I said.
“Um.” He turned away from all of us, peering into the distance. “Right.” He paused. “You know, I think I might be able to be talked into such a thing.”
I barked laughter at his archetypical male thoughts and desires. As usual, he would grudgingly agree to do what he was responsible for already.
“So, Carol, have you come up with anything on the war?” Sky asked. I didn’t fight the subject change. His timing was, as always, impeccable.
“No. And you?” I went back to pacing.
“My meager understanding of things military leads me to believe we are doomed,” Sky said.
“At least so far,” I said. “What do you see, Sky?”
“There aren’t enough resources here in the Chicago area to build a real army any time soon, or even stop Enkidu and his idiots if they came back healed up and with the reinforcements we know he has available.”
I nodded. “He’s not coming back here until after he swats down Haggerty and Webberly. Not without risking them showing up here as reinforcements, which they would, now that he’s shown the true strength of the Hunter armies.” Haggerty and Webberly were the next two Arms on the Arm hierarchy list. Enkidu was doing a top-down Arm swat. He had swatted down both Armenigar and Keaton, and humbled and exhausted them both…and he didn’t know about my return. Haggerty was next. Then Webberly, and then he would be out of senior Arms to swat. Next he would pick off the strong Focuses in detail. His plan was intelligent but unimaginative. It would also work. With essentially no chance of failure. Swatting down Armenigar in Calgary and Keaton in Chicago was the hard part.
I did wonder how in the hell he thought he was going to pick off Haggerty and her mobile army, though. Would he try to lure her into combat someplace stupid, perhaps? That wasn’t going to happen. He might have to go after Webberly and see if by doing so he could lure Haggerty within reach.
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